Amoebas of algebraic varieties and tropical geometry

We consider the metric space of all toric K\"ahler metrics on a compact toric manifold; when "looking at it from infinity" (following Gromov), we obtain the tangent cone at infinity, which is parametrized by equivalence classes of complete geodesics. In the present paper, we study the associated limit for the family of metrics on the toric variety, its quantization, and degeneration of generic divisors. The limits of the corresponding K\"ahler polarizations become degenerat...

This text is an introduction to algebraic enumerative geometry and to applications of tropical geometry to classical geometry, based on a course given during the X-UPS mathematical days, 2008 May 14th and 15th. The aim of this text is to be understandable by a first year master student.

This is a survey article written for the Jahresberichte der DMV. Tropical geometry can be viewed as an efficient combinatorial tool to study degenerations in algebraic geometry. Abstract tropical curves are essentially metric graphs, and covers of tropical curves maps between metric graphs satisfying certain conditions. In this short survey, we offer an introduction to the combinatorial theory of abstract tropical curves and covers of curves, and their moduli spaces, and we...

In this paper, we study the amoeba volume of a given $k-$dimensional generic analytic variety $V$ of the complex algebraic torus $(\C^*)^n$. When $n\geq 2k$, we show that $V$ is algebraic if and only if the volume of its amoeba is finite. In this precise case, we establish a comparison theorem for the volume of the amoeba and the coamoeba. Examples and applications to the $k-$linear spaces will be given.

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...

We give an introduction to Tropical Geometry and prove some results in Tropical Intersection Theory. The first part of this paper is an introduction to tropical geometry aimed at researchers in Algebraic Geometry from the point of view of degenerations of varieties using projective not-necessarily-normal toric varieties. The second part is a foundational account of tropical intersection theory with proofs of some new theorems relating it to classical intersection theory. Re...

This short article, which appeared in the MSRI Fall 2004 newletter, is intended for a general mathematical audience. It describes some mathematical themes from the Winter 2004 program at MSRI in topological aspects of real algebraic geometry in the context of an interpolation problem involving real rational plane curves.

This is mostly* a non-technical exposition of the joint work arXiv:1212.0373 with Caporaso and Payne. Topics include: Moduli of Riemann surfaces / algebraic curves; Deligne-Mumford compactification; Dual graphs and the combinatorics of the compactification; Tropical curves and their moduli; Non-archimedean geometry and comparison. * Maybe the last section is technical.

This is a write-up of the author's invited talk at the Eighth International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians (ICCM) held at Beijing in June 2019. We give a survey on joint works with Naichung Conan Leung and Ziming Nikolas Ma where we study how tropical objects arise from asymptotic analysis of the Maurer-Cartan equation for deformation of complex structures on a semi-flat Calabi-Yau manifold.

In this paper, we study the deformation theory of degenerate algebraic curves on singular varieties which appear as the degenerate limit of families of varieties. For this purpose, we systematically develop a new method to calculate the obstruction cohomology class of degenerate algebraic curves. This enables us to judge whether a given degenerate curve can be deformed to a smooth curve or not in variety of situations. In this paper, we apply it to curves of genus one on dege...