Tropical Geometry Seminar
Mathematics Department
University of Georgia
Fall 2009 - Spring 2010

Tuesdays 3:30 - 4:30, Boyd Grad Studies room 304

Organizers: Angela Gibney and Clint McCrory

Useful links:

Wikipedia - tropical geometry
A list of introductory and expository references is included.

Bernd Sturmfels' course on tropical geometry, Spring 2009
Current draft of the Maclagan-Sturmfels book: Introduction to Tropical Geometry (updated October 9, 2009)
The plan of our seminar is to work through these notes in the spring semester, after a few introductory talks in the fall.

MSRI tropical geometry program, Fall 2009
Lecture notes for the introductory workshop (8/24 - 8/28) are available from Clint McCrory. Official notes and videos of lectures are now available from MSRI streaming video lectures.

Schedule of lectures:

Tuesday, September 8 - Clint McCrory, "Introduction to tropical plane curves"
The tropicalization of a complex curve X = { f(z,w) = 0 } is a planar graph Γ that's a "combinatorial shadow" of X. Definition and simple examples of tropicalization; relation to Legendre transform.

Tuesday, September 15 - Clint McCrory, "Amoebas of plane curves"
Legendre transform revisited. Multiplicities of tropical curves and the balancing condition. Classical amoebas (Gelfand-Kapranov-Zelevinsky) - definition and examples.

Tuesday, October 13 - Angela Gibney, "Embedding $\bar{M}_{0,n}$ into a toric variety using tropical geometry"

Tuesday, November 3 - Angela Gibney, "The tropical Grassmannian"

Tuesday, November 17 - Angela Gibney, "The tropical Grassmannian," part 2.