This book is based on the lectures given at the Oberwolfach Seminar held in Fall 2021. Logarithmic Gromov-Witten theory lies at the heart of modern approaches to mirror symmetry, but also opens up a number of new directions in enumerative geometry of a more classical flavour. Tropical geometry forms the calculus through which calculations in this subject are carried out. These notes cover the foundational aspects of this tropical calculus, geometric aspects of the degeneration formula for Gromov-Witten invariants, and the practical nuances of working with and enumerating tropical curves. Readers will get an assisted entry route to the subject, focusing on examples and explicit calculations.
Tropical geometry is a combinatorial shadow of algebraic geometry, offering new polyhedral tools to compute invariants of algebraic varieties. It is based on tropical algebra, where the sum of two numbers is their minimum and the product is their sum. This turns polynomials into piecewise-linear functions, and their zero sets into polyhedral complexes. These tropical varieties retain a surprising amount of information about their classical counterparts. Tropical geometry is a young subject that has undergone a rapid development since the beginning of the 21st century. While establishing itself as an area in its own right, deep connections have been made to many branches of pure and applied mathematics. This book offers a self-contained introduction to tropical geometry, suitable as a course text for beginning graduate students. Proofs are provided for the main results, such as the Fundamental Theorem and the Structure Theorem. Numerous examples and explicit computations illustrate the main concepts. Each of the six chapters concludes with problems that will help the readers to practice their tropical skills, and to gain access to the research literature. This wonderful book will appeal to students and researchers of all stripes: it begins at an undergraduate level and ends with deep connections to toric varieties, compactifications, and degenerations. In between, the authors provide the first complete proofs in book form of many fundamental results in the subject. The pages are sprinkled with illuminating examples, applications, and exercises, and the writing is lucid and meticulous throughout. It is that rare kind of book which will be used equally as an introductory text by students and as a reference for experts. —Matt Baker, Georgia Institute of Technology Tropical geometry is an exciting new field, which requires tools from various parts of mathematics and has connections with many areas. A short definition is given by Maclagan and Sturmfels: “Tropical geometry is a marriage between algebraic and polyhedral geometry”. This wonderful book is a pleasant and rewarding journey through different landscapes, inviting the readers from a day at a beach to the hills of modern algebraic geometry. The authors present building blocks, examples and exercises as well as recent results in tropical geometry, with ingredients from algebra, combinatorics, symbolic computation, polyhedral geometry and algebraic geometry. The volume will appeal both to beginning graduate students willing to enter the field and to researchers, including experts. —Alicia Dickenstein, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Hurwitz theory, the study of analytic functions among Riemann surfaces, is a classical field and active research area in algebraic geometry. The subject's interplay between algebra, geometry, topology and analysis is a beautiful example of the interconnectedness of mathematics. This book introduces students to this increasingly important field, covering key topics such as manifolds, monodromy representations and the Hurwitz potential. Designed for undergraduate study, this classroom-tested text includes over 100 exercises to provide motivation for the reader. Also included are short essays by guest writers on how they use Hurwitz theory in their work, which ranges from string theory to non-Archimedean geometry. Whether used in a course or as a self-contained reference for graduate students, this book will provide an exciting glimpse at mathematics beyond the standard university classes.
This volume presents a lively introduction to the rapidly developing and vast research areas surrounding Calabi–Yau varieties and string theory. With its coverage of the various perspectives of a wide area of topics such as Hodge theory, Gross–Siebert program, moduli problems, toric approach, and arithmetic aspects, the book gives a comprehensive overview of the current streams of mathematical research in the area. The contributions in this book are based on lectures that took place during workshops with the following thematic titles: “Modular Forms Around String Theory,” “Enumerative Geometry and Calabi–Yau Varieties,” “Physics Around Mirror Symmetry,” “Hodge Theory in String Theory.” The book is ideal for graduate students and researchers learning about Calabi–Yau varieties as well as physics students and string theorists who wish to learn the mathematics behind these varieties.
This volume contains the proceedings of the CIEM workshop on Tropical Geometry, held December 12-16, 2011, at the International Centre for Mathematical Meetings (CIEM), Castro Urdiales, Spain. Tropical geometry is a new and rapidly developing field of mat
These notes present a polished introduction to tropical geometry and contain some applications of this rapidly developing and attractive subject. It consists of three chapters which complete each other and give a possibility for non-specialists to make the first steps in the subject which is not yet well represented in the literature. The notes are based on a seminar at the Mathematical Research Center in Oberwolfach in October 2004. The intended audience is graduate, post-graduate, and Ph.D. students as well as established researchers in mathematics.
This volume is a collection of papers from the International Conference on Tropical and Idempotent Mathematics, held in Moscow, Russia in August 2007. This is a relatively new branch of mathematical sciences that has been rapidly developing and gaining popularity over the last decade. Tropical mathematics can be viewed as a result of the Maslov dequantization applied to 'traditional' mathematics over fields. Importantly, applications in econophysics and statistical mechanics lead to an explanation of the nature of financial crises. Another original application provides an analysis of instabilities in electrical power networks. Idempotent analysis, tropical algebra, and tropical geometry are the building blocks of the subject. Contributions to idempotent analysis are focused on the Hamilton-Jacobi semigroup, the max-plus finite element method, and on the representations of eigenfunctions of idempotent linear operators. Tropical algebras, consisting of plurisubharmonic functions and their germs, are examined. The volume also contains important surveys and research papers on tropical linear algebra and tropical convex geometry.
This volume consolidates selected articles from the 2016 Apprenticeship Program at the Fields Institute, part of the larger program on Combinatorial Algebraic Geometry that ran from July through December of 2016. Written primarily by junior mathematicians, the articles cover a range of topics in combinatorial algebraic geometry including curves, surfaces, Grassmannians, convexity, abelian varieties, and moduli spaces. This book bridges the gap between graduate courses and cutting-edge research by connecting historical sources, computation, explicit examples, and new results.
