Chopped and sliced cones and representations of Kac-Moody algebras

Abstract

We introduce the notion of a chopped and sliced cone in combinatorial geometry and prove two structure theorems for the number of integral points in the individual slices of such a cone. We observe that this notion applies to weight multiplicities of Kac-Moody algebras and Littlewood-Richardson coefficients of semisimple Lie algebras, where we obtain the corresponding results.