Another Proof of the Fact that Polyhedral Cones are Finitely Generated

Abstract

In this note, we work out a simple inductive proof showing that every polyhedral cone K is the conic hull of a finite set X of vectors. The base cases of the induction are linear subspaces and linear halfspaces of linear subspaces. The proof also shows that the components of the vectors in X can be chosen (up to their sign) to be quotients of subdeterminants of the coefficient matrix of any inequality system defining K.