A biconvex polytope is a classical and tropical convex hull of finitely many points. Given a biconvex polytope, for each vertex of it we construct a directed bigraph and a gammoid so that the collection of base polytopes of those gammoids is a matroid subdivision of the hypersimplex, thereby proving a biconvex polytope arises as a cell of a tropical linear space. Our construction provides manually feasible guidelines for subdividing the hypersimplex into base polytopes, without resorting to computers. We work out the rank-4 case as a demonstration. We also show there is an injection from the vertices of any (k-1)-dimensional biconvex polytope into the degree-(k-1) monomials in k indeterminates.
The Chow polytope of an algebraic cycle in a torus depends only on its tropicalisation. Generalising this, we associate a Chow polytope to any abstract tropical variety in a tropicalised toric variety. Several significant polyhedra associated to tropical varieties are special cases of our Chow polytope. The Chow polytope of a tropical variety $X$ is given by a simple combinatorial construction: its normal subdivision is the Minkowski sum of $X$ and a reflected skeleton of the fan of the ambient toric variety.
The software TrIm offers implementations of tropical implicitization and tropical elimination, as developed by Tevelev and the authors. Given a polynomial map with generic coefficients, TrIm computes the tropical variety of the image. When the image is a hypersurface, the output is the Newton polytope of the defining polynomial. TrIm can thus be used to compute mixed fiber polytopes, including secondary polytopes.
In this paper, we develop a tropical analog of the classical flag variety that we call the flag Dressian. We find relations, which we call "tropical incidence relations", for when one tropical linear space is contained in another, and show that the flag Dressian is a tropical prevariety. In the case of 2-step flag Dressians, which we call "tropical incidence prevarieties", we find an equivalence between points in this space and induced subdivisions of a hypersimplex, generalizing two parts of an equivalence given by D. Speyer for tropical linear spaces. We attempt to generalize the third part …
We present our implementation of an algorithm which functions as a numerical oracle for the Newton polytope of a hypersurface in the Macaulay2 package NumericalNP.m2. We propose a tropical membership test, relying on this algorithm, for higher codimension varieties based on ideas from Hept and Theobald. To showcase this software, we investigate the Newton polytope of both a hypersurface coming from algebraic vision and the Luroth invariant.
We study the relationship between min-plus, max-plus and Euclidean convexity for subsets of $\mathbb{R}^n$. We introduce a construction which associates to any max-plus convex set with compact projectivisation a canonical matrix called its dominator. The dominator is a Kleene star whose max-plus column space is the min-plus convex hull of the original set. We apply this to show that a set which is any two of (i) a max-plus polytope, (ii) a min-plus polytope and (iii) a Euclidean polytope must also be the third. In particular, these results answer a question of Sergeev, Schneider and Butkovic a…
Let $g_1, ..., g_k$ be tropical polynomials in $n$ variables with Newton polytopes $P_1, ..., P_k$. We study combinatorial questions on the intersection of the tropical hypersurfaces defined by $g_1, ..., g_k$, such as the $f$-vector, the number of unbounded faces and (in case of a curve) the genus. Our point of departure is Vigeland's work who considered the special case $k=n-1$ and where all Newton polytopes are standard simplices. We generalize these results to arbitrary $k$ and arbitrary Newton polytopes $P_1, ..., P_k$. This provides new formulas for the number of faces and the genus in t…
We define nondegenerate tropical complete intersections imitating the corresponding definition in complex algebraic geometry. As in the complex situation, all nonzero intersection multiplicity numbers between tropical hypersurfaces defining a nondegenerate tropical complete intersection are equal to 1. The intersection multiplicity numbers we use are sums of mixed volumes of polytopes which are dual to cells of the tropical hypersurfaces. We show that the Euler characteristic of a real nondegenerate tropical complete intersection depends only on the Newton polytopes of the tropical polynomials…
K3 polytopes appear in complements of tropical quartic surfaces. They are dual to regular unimodular central triangulations of reflexive polytopes in the fourth dilation of the standard tetrahedron. Exploring these combinatorial objects, we classify K3 polytopes with up to $30$ vertices. Their number is $36\,297\,333$. We study the singular loci of quartic surfaces that tropicalize to K3 polytopes. These surfaces are stable in the sense of Geometric Invariant Theory.
We study how geometric properties of tropical convex sets and polytopes, which are of interest in many application areas, manifest themselves in their algebraic structure as modules over the tropical semiring. Our main results establish a close connection between pure dimension of tropical convex sets, and projectivity (in the sense of ring theory). These results lead to a geometric understanding of idempotency for tropical matrices. As well as their direct interest, our results suggest that there is substantial scope to apply ideas and techniques from abstract algebra (in particular, ring the…
The tropical Stiefel map associates to a tropical matrix A its tropical Pluecker vector of maximal minors, and thus a tropical linear space L(A). We call the L(A)s obtained in this way Stiefel tropical linear spaces. We prove that they are dual to certain matroid subdivisions of polytopes of transversal matroids, and we relate their combinatorics to a canonically associated tropical hyperplane arrangement. We also explore a broad connection with the secondary fan of the Newton polytope of the product of all maximal minors of a matrix. In addition, we investigate the natural parametrization of …
The algebraic foundation of tropical polynomial algebra provides the framework for the geometric construction of the supplement and the reversal of tropical varieties, thereby inducing a duality of reduced tropical varieties; for classes of tropical hypersurfaces the corresponding point symmetry is obtained for their Newton polytopes and lattice polytopes.
We find a relation between mixed volumes of several polytopes and the convex hull of their union, deducing it from the following fact: the mixed volume of a collection of polytopes only depends on the product of their support functions (rather than on the individual support functions). For integer polytopes, this dependence is essentially a certain specialization of the isomorphism between two well-known combinatorial models for the cohomology of toric varieties, however, this construction has not been extended to arbitrary polytopes so far (partially due to the lack of combinatorial tools cap…
In this paper we investigate the idea of a tropical critical point of the superpotential for the full flag variety of type A. Recall that associated to an irreducible representation of G=SLn(C) are various polytopes whose integral points parameterize a basis for the representation, e.g. the Gelfand-Zetlin polytope. Such polytopes can be constructed via the theory of geometric crystals by tropicalising a certain function, and in fact, the function involved coincides with the superpotential from the Landau-Ginzburg model for G/B coming from mirror symmetry. In mirror symmetry a special role is p…
For $i = 0, 1, \ldots, n$, let $C_i$ be independent and identically distributed random variables with distribution $F$ with support $(0,\infty)$. The number of zeros of the random tropical polynomials $\mathcal{T}f_n(x) = \min_{i=1,\ldots,n}(C_i + ix)$ is also the number of faces of the lower convex hull of the $n+1$ random points $(i,C_i)$ in $\mathbb{R}^2$. We show that this number, $Z_n$, satisfies a central limit theorem when $F$ has polynomial decay near $0$. Specifically, if $F$ near $0$ behaves like a $gamma(a,1)$ distribution for some $a > 0$, then $Z_n$ has the same asymptotics as the…
The purpose of this note is to give an exposition of some interesting combinatorics and convex geometry concepts that appear in algebraic geometry in relation to counting the number of solutions of a system of polynomial equations in several variables over complex numbers. The exposition is aimed for a general audience in mathematics and we hope to be accessible to undergraduate as well as advance high school students. The topics discussed belong to relatively new, and closely related branches of algebraic geometry which are usually referred to as tropical geometry and toric geometry. These ar…
There is a well known correspondence between the triangle inequality for a distance function on a finite set, and idempotency of an associated matrix over the tropical semiring. Recent research has shed new light on the structure (algebraic, combinatorial and geometric) of tropical idempotents, and in this paper we explore the consequences of this for the metric geometry of tropical polytopes. We prove, for example, that every n-point metric space is realised by the Hilbert projective metric on the vertices of a pure n-dimensional tropical polytope in tropical n-space. More generally, every n-…
The tropical variety defined by linear equations with constant coefficients is the Bergman fan of the corresponding matroid. Building on a self-contained introduction to matroid polytopes, we present a geometric construction of the Bergman fan, and we discuss its relationship with the simplicial complex of nested sets in the lattice of flats. The Bergman complex is triangulated by the nested set complex, and the two complexes coincide if and only if every connected flat remains connected after contracting along any subflat. This sharpens a result of Ardila-Klivans who showed that the Bergman c…
We apply tropical geometry to study the image of a map defined by Laurent polynomials with generic coefficients. If this image is a hypersurface then our approach gives a construction of its Newton polytope.
The spinor variety is cut out by the quadratic Wick relations among the principal Pfaffians of an n x n skew-symmetric matrix. Its points correspond to n-dimensional isotropic subspaces of a 2n-dimensional vector space. In this paper we tropicalize this picture, and we develop a combinatorial theory of tropical Wick vectors and tropical linear spaces that are tropically isotropic. We characterize tropical Wick vectors in terms of subdivisions of Delta-matroid polytopes, and we examine to what extent the Wick relations form a tropical basis. Our theory generalizes several results for tropical l…
We define tropical analogues of the notions of linear space and Plucker coordinate and study their combinatorics. We introduce tropical analogues of intersection and dualization and define a tropical linear space built by repeated dualization and transverse intersection to be constructible. Our main result that all constructible tropical linear spaces have the same f-vector and are ``series-parallel''. We conjecture that this f-vector is maximal for all tropical linear spaces with equality precisely for the series-parallel tropical linear spaces. We present many partial results towards this co…
We define and study the cyclic Bergman fan of a matroid M, which is a simplicial polyhedral fan supported on the tropical linear space T(M) of M and is amenable to computational purposes. It slightly refines the nested set structure on T(M), and its rays are in bijection with flats of M which are either cyclic flats or singletons. We give a fast algorithm for calculating it, making some computational applications of tropical geometry now viable. Our C++ implementation, called TropLi, and a tool for computing vertices of Newton polytopes of A-discriminants, are both available online.
We define Stasheff polytopes in the space of tropical points of cluster A-varieties. We study the supports of products of elements of canonical bases for cluster X-varieties. We prove that, for the cluster X-variety of type A_n, such supports are Stasheff polytopes.
The study of the moment map from the Grassmannian to the hypersimplex, and the relation between torus orbits and matroid polytopes, dates back to the foundational 1987 work of Gelfand-Goresky-MacPherson-Serganova. On the other hand, the amplituhedron is a very new object, defined by Arkani-Hamed-Trnka in connection with scattering amplitudes in $\mathcal{N}=4$ super Yang-Mills theory. In this paper we discover a striking duality between the moment map $μ:Gr^{\geq0}_{k+1,n}\toΔ_{k+1,n}$ from the positive Grassmannian $Gr^{\geq0}_{k+1,n}$ to the hypersimplex, and the amplituhedron map $\tilde{Z}…
The Dressian and the tropical Grassmannian parameterize abstract and realizable tropical linear spaces; but in general, the Dressian is much larger than the tropical Grassmannian. There are natural positive notions of both of these spaces -- the positive Dressian, and the positive tropical Grassmannian (which we introduced roughly fifteen years ago) -- so it is natural to ask how these two positive spaces compare. In this paper we show that the positive Dressian equals the positive tropical Grassmannian. Using the connection between the positive Dressian and regular positroidal subdivisions of…
In this paper we address two of the major foundational questions in the theory of matroids over rings. First, we provide a cryptomorphic axiomatisation, by introducing an analogue of the base polytope for matroids. Second, we describe a parameter space for matroids over a valuation ring, which turns out to be a tropical version of the Bott-Samelson varieties for the full flag variety. Thus a matroid over a valuation ring is a sequence of flags of tropical linear spaces a.k.a. valuated matroids.
In this paper we study the role of planarity in generalized scattering amplitudes, through several closely interacting structures in combinatorics, algebraic and tropical geometry. The generalized biadjoint scalar amplitude, introduced recently by Cachazo-Early-Guevara-Mizera (CEGM), is a rational function of homogeneous degree $-(k-1)(n-k-1)$ in $\binom{n}{k}-n$ independent variables; its poles can be constructed directly from the rays of the positive tropical Grassmannian. We introduce for each pair of integers $(k,n)$ with $2\le k\le n-2$ a system of generalized positive roots which arises …
We define and study the totally nonnegative part of the Chow quotient of the Grassmannian, or more simply the nonnegative configuration space. This space has a natural stratification by positive Chow cells, and we show that nonnegative configuration space is homeomorphic to a polytope as a stratified space. We establish bijections between positive Chow cells and the following sets: (a) regular subdivisions of the hypersimplex into positroid polytopes, (b) the set of cones in the positive tropical Grassmannian, and (c) the set of cones in the positive Dressian. Our work is motivated by connecti…
