The moment polytope also encodes quantum information about the actions of G. Using the methods of geometric quantization, one can frequently convert this action into a representations, p , of G on a Hilbert space, and in some sense the moment polytope is a diagrammatic picture of the irreducible representations of G which occur as subrepresentations of p. Precise versions of this item of folklore are discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. Also, midway through Chapter 2 a more complicated object is discussed: the Duistermaat-Heckman measure, and the author explains in Chapter 4 how one can read off from this measure the approximate multiplicities with which the irreducible representations of G occur in p. This gives an excuse to touch on some results which are in themselves of great current interest: the Duistermaat-Heckman theorem, the localization theorems in equivariant cohomology of Atiyah-Bott and Berline-Vergne and the recent extremely exciting generalizations of these results by Witten, Jeffrey-Kirwan, Lalkman, and others. The last two chapters of this book are a self-contained and somewhat unorthodoxtreatment of the theory of toric varieties in which the usual hierarchal relation of complex to symplectic is reversed. This book is addressed to researchers