A bit of tropical geometry

This friendly introduction to tropical geometry is meant to be accessible to first year students in mathematics. The topics discussed here are basic tropical algebra, tropical plane curves, some tropical intersections, and Viro's patchworking. Each definition is explained with concrete examples and illustrations. To a great exten, this text is an updated of a translation from a french text by the first author. There is also a newly added section highlighting new developments and perspectives on tropical geometry. In addition, the final section provides an extensive list of references on the subject.Comment: 27 pages, 19 figure

The separating semigroup of a real curve

We introduce the separating semigroup of a real algebraic curve of dividing type. The elements of this semigroup record the possible degrees of the covering maps obtained by restricting separating morphisms to the real part of the curve. We also introduce the hyperbolic semigroup which consists of elements of the separating semigroup arising from morphisms which are compositions of a linear projection with an embedding of the curve to some projective space. We completely determine both semigroups in the case of maximal curves. We also prove that any embedding of a real curve to projective space of sufficiently high degree is hyperbolic. Using these semigroups we show that the hyperbolicity locus of an embedded curve is in general not connected.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, published version, comments welcome

Brief introduction to tropical geometry

The paper consists of lecture notes for a mini-course given by the authors at the G\"okova Geometry \& Topology conference in May 2014. We start the exposition with tropical curves in the plane and their applications to problems in classical enumerative geometry, and continue with a look at more general tropical varieties and their homology theories.Comment: 75 pages, 37 figures, many examples and exercise

Non-existence of torically maximal hypersurfaces

Torically maximal curves (known also as simple Harnack curves) are real algebraic curves in the projective plane such that their logarithmic Gau{\ss} map is totally real. In this paper we show that hyperplanes in projective spaces are the only torically maximal hypersurfaces of higher dimensions.Comment: 10 pages. V2 merges the first version of this paper with the first version of arXiv:1510.0026

Toric degenerations of Grassmannians from matching fields

We study the algebraic combinatorics of monomial degenerations of Pl\"ucker forms which is governed by matching fields in the sense of Sturmfels and Zelevinsky. We provide a necessary condition for a matching field to yield a Khovanskii basis of the Pl\"ucker algebra for $3$-planes in $n$-space. When the ideal associated to the matching field is quadratically generated this condition is both necessary and sufficient. Finally, we describe a family of matching fields, called $2$-block diagonal, whose ideals are quadratically generated. These matching fields produce a new family of toric degenerations of \Gr(3, n)

Tropicalization of del Pezzo surfaces

We determine the tropicalizations of very affine surfaces over a valued field that are obtained from del Pezzo surfaces of degree 5, 4 and 3 by removing their (-1)-curves. On these tropical surfaces, the boundary divisors are represented by trees at infinity. These trees are glued together according to the Petersen, Clebsch and Schläfli graphs, respectively. There are 27 trees on each tropical cubic surface, attached to a bounded complex with up to 73 polygons. The maximal cones in the 4-dimensional moduli fan reveal two generic types of such surfaces