A polytrope is a tropical polytope which at the same time is convex in the ordinary sense. A $d$-dimensional polytrope turns out to be a tropical simplex, that is, it is the tropical convex hull of $d+1$ points. This statement is equivalent to the known fact that the Segre product of two full polynomial rings (over some field $K$) has the Gorenstein property if and only if the factors are generated by the same number of indeterminates. The combinatorial types of polytropes up to dimension three are classified.
The tropical convex hull of a finite set of points in tropical projective space has a natural structure of a cellular free resolution. Therefore, methods from computational commutative algebra can be used to compute tropical convex hulls. Tropical cyclic polytopes are also presented.
We consider Gromov's homological higher convexity for complements of tropical varieties, establishing it for complements of tropical hypersurfaces and curves, and for nonarchimedean amoebas of varieties that are complete intersections over the field of complex Puiseaux series. Based on these results, we conjecture that the complement of a tropical variety has this higher convexity, and we prove a weak form of our conjecture for the nonarchimedean amoeba of a variety over the complex Puiseaux field. One of our main tools is Jonsson's limit theorem for tropical varieties.
The notions of convexity and convex polytopes are introduced in the setting of tropical geometry. Combinatorial types of tropical polytopes are shown to be in bijection with regular triangulations of products of two simplices. Applications to phylogenetic trees are discussed. Theorem 29 and Corollary 30 in the paper, relating tropical polytopes to injective hulls, are incorrect. See the erratum at http://www.math.uiuc.edu/documenta/vol-09/vol-09-eng.html .
We establish a new notion of tropical convexity for signed tropical numbers. We provide several equivalent descriptions involving balance relations and intersections of open halfspaces as well as the image of a union of polytopes over Puiseux series and hyperoperations. Along the way, we deduce a new Farkas lemma and Fourier-Motzkin elimination without the non-negativity restriction on the variables. This leads to a Minkowski-Weyl theorem for polytopes over the signed tropical numbers.
Using a potential theory on metric graphs "Gamma", we introduce the notion of tropical convexity to the space "RDiv^d(Gamma)" of effective R-divisors of degree d on "Gamma" and show that a natural metric can be defined on "RDiv^d(Gamma)". In addition, we extend the notion of reduced divisors which is conventionally defined in a complete linear system |D| with respect to a single point in "Gamma". In our general setting, a reduced divisor is defined uniquely as an R-divisor in a compact tropical convex subset "T" of "RDiv^d(Gamma)" with respect to a certain R-divisor "E" of the same degree d. I…
The notion of convexity in tropical geometry is closely related to notions of convexity in the theory of affine buildings. We explore this relationship from a combinatorial and computational perspective. Our results include a convex hull algorithm for the Bruhat--Tits building of SL$_d(K)$ and techniques for computing with apartments and membranes. While the original inspiration was the work of Dress and Terhalle in phylogenetics, and of Faltings, Kapranov, Keel and Tevelev in algebraic geometry, our tropical algorithms will also be applicable to problems in other fields of mathematics.
We investigate a canonical extension of a conventional combinatorial notion of reduced divisors to a notion of tropical projections, which can be defined as the unique minimizers of the so-called $B$-pseudonorms with respect to compact tropical convex sets. In this paper, we build the foundation of a theory of idempotent analysis using tropical projections and obtain a series of subsequent results, e.g. tropical retracts, construction of compact tropical convex sets and a set-theoretical characterization of tropical weak independence. In particular, we prove a tropical version of Mazur's Theor…
This is a survey on tropical polytopes from the combinatorial point of view and with a focus on algorithms. Tropical convexity is interesting because it relates a number of combinatorial concepts including ordinary convexity, monomial ideals, subdivisions of products of simplices, matroid theory, finite metric spaces, and the tropical Grassmannians. The relationship between these topics is explained via one running example throughout the whole paper. The final section explains how the new version 2.9.4 of the software system polymake can be used to compute with tropical polytopes.
We study the geometry of metrics and convexity structures on the space of phylogenetic trees, which is here realized as the tropical linear space of all \ ultrametrics. The ${\rm CAT}(0)$-metric of Billera-Holmes-Vogtman arises from the theory of orthant spaces. While its geodesics can be computed by the Owen-Provan algorithm, geodesic triangles are complicated. We show that the dimension of such a triangle can be arbitrarily high. Tropical convexity and the tropical metric behave better. They exhibit properties desirable for geometric statistics, such as geodesics of small depth.
In this paper, we investigate tropical secant varieties of ordinary linear spaces. These correspond to the log-limit sets of ordinary toric varieties; we show that their interesting parts are combinatorially isomorphic to a certain natural subcomplex of the complex of regular subdivisions of a corresponding point set, and we display the range of behavior of this object. We also use this characterization to reformulate the question of determining Barvinok rank into a question regarding regular subdivisions of products of simplices.
Elementary solutions of ordinary tropical differential equations, and vanishing orders of solutions of algebraic differential equations
Centro de Investigación en Matemáticas, A.C. (CIMAT)（墨西哥数学研究中心）；Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Azcapotzalco（墨西哥国立自治大学阿兹卡波察尔科分校）；Department of Physics and Mathematics, Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México（墨西哥伊比利亚美洲大学物理与数学系）
It is known that any tropical polytope is the image under the valuation map of ordinary polytopes over the Puiseux series field. The latter polytopes are called lifts of the tropical polytope. We prove that any pure tropical polytope is the intersection of the tropical half-spaces given by the images under the valuation map of the facet-defining half-spaces of a certain lift. We construct this lift explicitly, taking into account geometric properties of the given polytope. Moreover, when the generators of the tropical polytope are in general position, we prove that the above property is satisf…
We show that several decision problems originating from max-plus or tropical convexity are equivalent to zero-sum two player game problems. In particular, we set up an equivalence between the external representation of tropical convex sets and zero-sum stochastic games, in which tropical polyhedra correspond to deterministic games with finite action spaces. Then, we show that the winning initial positions can be determined from the associated tropical polyhedron. We obtain as a corollary a game theoretical proof of the fact that the tropical rank of a matrix, defined as the maximal size of a s…
Using tropical convexity Dochtermann, Fink, and Sanyal proved that regular fine mixed subdivisions of Minkowski sums of simplices support minimal cellular resolutions. They asked if the regularity condition can be removed. We give an affirmative answer by a different method. A new easily checked sufficient condition for a subdivided polytope to support a cellular resolution is proved. The main tool used is discrete Morse theory.
We introduce tropical analogues of the notion of volume of polytopes, leading to a tropical version of the (discrete) classical isoperimetric inequality. The planar case is elementary, but a higher-dimensional generalization leads to an interesting class of ordinary convex polytopes, characterizing the equality case in the isoperimetric inequality. This study is motivated by open complexity questions concerning linear optimization and its tropical analogs.
In this paper we focus on the tropical convex hull of convex sets and polyhedral complexes. We give a vertex description of the tropical convex hull of a line segment and a ray. %in \RR^{n+1}/\RR\mathbf{1}. Next we show that tropical convex hull and ordinary convex hull commute in two dimensions and characterize tropically convex polyhedra in any dimension. %$\mathbb{R}^3/\mathbb {R}\mathbf{1}$. Finally we show that the dimension of a tropically convex fan depends on the coordinates of its rays and give a lower bound on the degree of a fan tropical curve using only tropical techniques.
We introduce a notion of dimension of max-min convex sets, following the approach of tropical convexity. We introduce a max-min analogue of the tropical rank of a matrix and show that it is equal to the dimension of the associated polytope. We describe the relation between this rank and the notion of strong regularity in max-min algebra, which is traditionally defined in terms of unique solvability of linear systems and trapezoidal property.
We prove two colorful Carathéodory theorems for strongly convex hulls, generalizing the colorful Caratéodory theorem for ordinary convexity by Imre Bárány, the non-colorful Carathéodory theorem for strongly convex hulls by the second author, and the "very colorful theorems" by the first author and others. We also investigate if the assumption of a "generating convex set" is really needed in such results and try to give a topological criterion for one convex body to be a Minkowski summand of another.
Polytropes are both ordinary and tropical polytopes. We show that tropical types of polytropes in $\mathbb{TP}^{n-1}$ are in bijection with cones of a certain Gröbner fan $\mathcal{GF}_n$ in $\mathbb{R}^{n^2 - n}$ restricted to a small cone called the polytrope region. These in turn are indexed by compatible sets of bipartite and triangle binomials. Geometrically, on the polytrope region, $\mathcal{GF}_n$ is the refinement of two fans: the fan of linearity of the polytrope map appeared in \cite{tran.combi}, and the bipartite binomial fan. This gives two algorithms for enumerating tropical type…
We apply tropical geometry to study matrix algebras over a field with valuation. Using the shapes of min-max convexity, known as polytropes, we revisit the graduated orders introduced by Plesken and Zassenhaus. These are classified by the polytrope region. We advance the ideal theory of graduated orders by introducing their ideal class polytropes. This article emphasizes examples and computations. It offers first steps in the geometric combinatorics of endomorphism rings of configurations in affine buildings.
For a function defined on a convex set in a Euclidean space, midpoint convexity is the property requiring that the value of the function at the midpoint of any line segment is not greater than the average of its values at the endpoints of the line segment. Midpoint convexity is a well-known characterization of ordinary convexity under very mild assumptions. For a function defined on the integer lattice, we consider the analogous notion of discrete midpoint convexity, a discrete version of midpoint convexity where the value of the function at the (possibly noninteger) midpoint is replaced by th…
