This book on convex functions emerges out of 15 years of collaboration between the authors. It is far from being the first on the subject nor will it be the last. It is neither a book on convex analysis such as Rockafellar's foundational 1970 book [369] nor a book on convex programming such as Boyd and Vandenberghe's excellent recent text [128]. There are a number of fine books – both recent and less so – on both those subjects or on convexity and relatedly on variational analysis. Books such as [371, 255, 378, 256, 121, 96, 323, 332] complement or overlap in various ways with our own focus which is to explore the interplay between the structure of a normed space and the properties of convex functions which can exist thereon. In some ways, among the most similar books to ours are those of Phelps [349] and of Giles [229] in that both also straddle the fields of geometric functional analysis and convex analysis – but without the convex function itself being the central character.

We have structured this book so as to accommodate a variety of readers. This leads to some intentional repetition. Chapter 1 makes the case for the ubiquity of convexity, largely by way of examples, many but not all of which are followed up in later chapters. Chapter 2 then provides a foundation for the study of convex functions in Euclidean (finite-dimensional) space, and Chapter 3 reprises important special structures such as polyhedrality, eigenvalue optimization and semidefinite programming.