An introduction to computational aspects of polynomial amoebas -- a survey

Let $V$ be a complex algebraic hypersurface defined by a polynomial $f$ with Newton polytope $\Delta$. It is well known that the spine of its amoeba has a structure of a tropical hypersurface. We prove in this paper that there exists a complex tropical hypersurface $V_{\infty, f}$ such that its coamoeba is homeomorphic to the closure in the real torus of the coamoeba of $V$. Moreover, the coamoeba of $V_{\infty, f}$ contains an arrangement of $(n-1)$-torus depending only on t...

Given a complex algebraic hypersurface~$H$, we introduce a polyhedral complex which is a subset of the Newton polytope of the defining polynomial for~$H$ and enjoys the key topological and combinatorial properties of the amoeba of~$H.$ We provide an explicit formula for this polyhedral complex in the case when the spine of the amoeba is dual to a triangulation of the Newton polytope of the defining polynomial. In particular, this yields a description of the polyhedral complex...

Morphological amoebas are image-adaptive structuring elements for morphological and other local image filters introduced by Lerallut et al. Their construction is based on combining spatial distance with contrast information into an image-dependent metric. Amoeba filters show interesting parallels to image filtering methods based on partial differential equations (PDEs), which can be confirmed by asymptotic equivalence results. In computing amoebas, graph structures are genera...

Amoebae from tropical geometry and the Mahler measure from number theory play important roles in quiver gauge theories and dimer models. Their dependencies on the coefficients of the Newton polynomial closely resemble each other, and they are connected via the Ronkin function. Genetic symbolic regression methods are employed to extract the numerical relationships between the 2d and 3d amoebae components and the Mahler measure. We find that the volume of the bounded complement...

The amoeba of a Laurent polynomial $f \in \C[z_1^{\pm 1},\ldots,z_n^{\pm 1}]$ is the image of its zero set $\mathcal{V}(f)$ under the log-absolute-value map. Understanding the space of amoebas (i.e., the decomposition of the space of all polynomials, say, with given support or Newton polytope, with regard to the existing complement components) is a widely open problem. In this paper we investigate the class of polynomials $f$ whose Newton polytope $\New(f)$ is a simplex and...

Amoebas and coamoebas are the logarithmic images of algebraic varieties and the images of algebraic varieties under the arg-map, respectively. We present new techniques for computational problems on amoebas and coamoebas, thus establishing new connections between (co-)amoebas, semialgebraic and convex algebraic geometry and semidefinite programming. Our approach is based on formulating the membership problem in amoebas (respectively coamoebas) as a suitable real algebraic f...

We completely characterize sections of the cones of nonnegative polynomials, convex polynomials and sums of squares with polynomials supported on circuits, a genuine class of sparse polynomials. In particular, nonnegativity is characterized by an invariant, which can be immediately derived from the initial polynomial. Furthermore, nonnegativity of such polynomials $f$ coincides with solidness of the amoeba of $f$, i.e., the Log-absolute-value image of the algebraic variety $\...

The prime motivation behind this paper is to prove that any torus link $\mathcal{L}$ can be realized as the union of the one-dimensional connected components of the set of critical values of the argument map restricted to a complex algebraic plane curve. Moreover, given an isolated complex algebraic plane curve quasi-homogeneous singularity, we give an explicit topological and geometric description of the link $\mathcal{L}$ corresponding to this singularity. In other words, w...

Given any complex Laurent polynomial $f$, $\mathrm{Amoeba}(f)$ is the image of its complex zero set under the coordinate-wise log absolute value map. We give an efficiently constructible polyhedral approximation, $\mathrm{ArchtTrop}(f)$, of $\mathrm{Amoeba}(f)$, and derive explicit upper and lower bounds, solely as a function of the number of monomial terms of $f$, for the Hausdorff distance between these two sets. We also show that deciding whether a given point lies in $\ma...

Exploiting a connection between amoebas and tropical curves, we devise a method for computing tropical curves using numerical algebraic geometry and give an implementation. As an application, we use this technique to compute Newton polygons of $A$-polynomials of knots.