Recently, cutting planes derived from maximal lattice-free convex sets have been
studied intensively by the integer programming community. An important question in this
research area has been to decide whether the closures associated with certain families of
lattice-free sets are polyhedra. For a long time, the only result known was the celebrated
theorem of Cook, Kannan and Schrijver who showed that the split closure is a polyhedron.
Although some fairly general results were obtained by Andersen, Louveaux and Weismantel [
An analysis of mixed integer linear sets based on lattice point free convex sets, Math.
Oper. Res. 35 (2010), 233--256] and Averkov [On finitely generated closures in the theory
of cutting planes, Discrete Optimization 9 (2012), no. 4, 209--215], some basic questions
have remained unresolved. For example, maximal lattice-free triangles are the natural
family to study beyond the family of splits and it has been a standing open problem to
decide whether the triangle closure is a polyhedron. In this paper, we show that when the
number of integer variables $m=2$ the triangle closure is indeed a polyhedron and its
number of facets can be bounded by a polynomial in the size of the input data. The
techniques of this proof are also used to give a refinement of necessary conditions for
valid inequalities being facet-defining due to Cornu