An orbitope is the convex hull of an orbit of a compact group acting linearly
on a vector space. These highly symmetric convex bodies lie at the crossroads
of several fields, in particular convex geometry, optimization, and algebraic
geometry. We present a self-contained theory of orbitopes, with particular
emphasis on instances arising from the groups SO(n) and O(n). These include
Schur-Horn orbitopes, tautological orbitopes, Caratheodory orbitopes, Veronese
orbitopes and Grassmann orbitopes. We study their face lattices, their
algebraic boundary hypersurfaces, and representations as spectrahedra or
projected spectrahedra.Comment: 37 pages. minor revisions of origina