Algebraic Geometry Seminar

Moduli of Tropical Plane Curves

Speaker: Ralph Morisson, UC Berkeley

Location: Warren Weaver Hall 201

Date: Tuesday, April 21, 2015, 3:30 p.m.

Synopsis:

Smooth curves in the tropical plane come from unimodular triangulations of lattice polygons. The skeleton of such a curve is a metric graph whose genus is the number of lattice points in the interior of the polygon. In this talk we report on work concerning the following realizability problem: Characterize all metric graphs that admit a planar representation as a smooth tropical curve. For instance, about 29.5 percent of metric graphs of genus 3 have this property. (Joint work with Sarah Brodsky, Michael Joswig, and Bernd Sturmfels.)