The Brunn–Minkowski theory is the classical core of the geometry of convex bodies. It originated with the thesis of Hermann Brunn in 1887 and is in its essential parts the creation of Hermann Minkowski, around the turn of the century. The well-known survey of Bonnesen and Fenchel in 1934 collected what was already an impressive body of results, though important developments were still to come, through the work of A.D. Aleksandrov and others in the thirties. In recent decades, the theory of convex bodies has expanded considerably; new topics have been developed and originally neglected branches of the subject have gained in interest. For instance, the combinatorial aspects, the theory of convex polytopes and the local theory of Banach spaces attract particular attention now. Nevertheless, the Brunn–Minkowski theory has remained of constant interest owing to its various new applications, its connections with other fields, and the challenge of some resistant open problems.

Aiming at a brief characterization of Brunn–Minkowski theory, one might say that it is the result of merging two elementary notions for point sets in Euclidean space: vector addition and volume. The vector addition of convex bodies, usually called Minkowski addition, has many facets of independent geometric interest. Combined with volume, it leads to the fundamental Brunn–Minkowski inequality and the notion of mixed volumes. The latter satisfy a series of inequalities which, due to their flexibility, solve many extremal problems and yield several uniqueness results. Looking at mixed volumes from a local point of view, one is led to mixed area measures.