Abstract:We review the theory of combinatorial intersection cohomology of fans developed by Barthel-Brasselet-Fieseler-Kaup, Bressler-Lunts, and Karu. This theory gives a substitute for the intersection cohomology of toric varieties which has all the expected formal properties but makes sense even for non-rational fans, which do not define a toric variety. As a result, a number of interesting results on the toric g and h polynomials have been extended from rational polytopes to general polytopes. We present explicit complexes computing the combinatorial IH in degrees one and two; the degree two complex gives the rigidity complex previously used by Kalai to study g 2 . We present several new results which follow from these methods, as well as previously unpublished proofs of Kalai that g k (P ) = 0 implies g k (P * ) = 0 and g k+1 (P ) = 0.For a d-dimensional convex polytope P , Stanley [St2] defined a polynomial invariant h(P, t) = d k=0 h k (P )t k of its face lattice, which is usually called the "generalized" or "toric" h-polynomial of P . It is "generalized" in that it extends a previous definition from simplicial polytopes to general polytopes, while the adjective "toric" refers to the fact that if P is a rational polytope (meaning that all its vertices have all coordinates in Q), then the coefficients of h(P, t) are intersection cohomology Betti numbers of an associated projective toric variety X P :(1) h k (P ) = dim R IH 2k (X P ; R).