Chopped and sliced cones and representations of Kac–Moody algebras

We introduce the notion of a chopped and sliced cone in combinatorial geometry and prove a structure theorem expressing the number of integral points in a slice of such a cone by means of a vector partition function. We observe that this notion applies to weight multiplicities of Kac–Moody algebras and to Clebsch–Gordan coefficients for semisimple Lie algebras. This has algorithmic applications, as we demonstrate computing some explicit examples.