Math 666: Tropical Geometry

Instructor: Frank Sottile
Lectures: MWF 10:10 -- 11:20 AM
Course Announcement
Course webpage: www.math.tamu.edu/~sottile/teaching/09.2/tropical.html

Course description:
Tropical geometry is an emerging mathematical discipline at the crossroads of algebraic geometry and geometric combinatorics. It may be regarded as the geometry that one obtains upon replacing the arithmetical operations of addition and multiplication by maximum and sum, but this does not quite capture its essence. Roughly, algebraic varieties are replaced by polyhedral complexes which retain many of the properties of the original varieties.

Grading: This will be based on class attendance, some (2-3) homework assignments, and a presentation of a paper.

Schedule:
Detailed Schedule
Frank is scheduled to miss several classes, which will be made up by manditory guest lectures in afternoon seminars, algebraic geometry or algebra and combinatorics seminar at 3:00 PM, as well as the final presentations.

Friday September 11	Guest lecture: Jan Draisma : Theorem of Yuster and Yu (see link below)
Friday September 25	No class: Frank in Michigan
Monday October 5	Guest lecture & seminar: Josephine Yu
Friday October 16	No class: Frank at AMS meeting
Wednesday October 28	Guest lecture & seminar: Mounir Nisse
Monday November 2	Guest lecture & seminar: Erwan Brugallé
Monday November 9	Guest lecture & seminar: Gregg Musiker
November 20--25	No class: Frank in Germany
No Final Exam, likely final projects

Bibliography:

A tropical toolkit, Eric Katz.
Fibers of tropicalization, Sam Payne.
Introduction to Tropical Geometry, Maclagan and Sturmfels. Draft of a textbook, 110 pages.
First steps in tropical geometry, Richter-Gebert, Sturmfels, Theobald.
The Tropical Grassmannian, David Speyer and Bernd Sturmfels.
Representing tropical linear spaces by circuits. Josephine Yu, Debbie S. Yuster.

Last modified: Wed Aug 5 09:06:42 CST 2009