Tropical differential Gröbner bases (Q2035624)

The paper introduces the concept of tropical differential Gröbner basis for differential ideals consisting of differential polynomials with coefficients in a particular differential valued field, and it gives a complete algorithm (\textit{Tr-DGB}) to compute this basis for a particular type of differential ideals, namely those generated by homogeneous linear differential polynomials with constant coefficients. This can be regarded as a special case of another algorithm in the same paper, named \textit{Tropical Gröbner Basis}, which is Buchberger-style, can be applied to any differential ideal, and the authors conjecture that it will compute the differential tropical Gröbner basis of the differential ideals for which this basis turns out to be finite. The concept of Gröbner basis of an ideal in a polynomial ring with coefficients in a commutative ring is an important tool in computational algebra. For instance, a central problem in algebraic geometry is computing suitable bases for ideals from which one can effectively compute the sets of zeroes (affine algebraic varieties) that they define. There are adaptations of this concept when the ring of coefficients or the polynomial ring have extra structure, and those relevant for the present work are the following two: \begin{enumerate} \item rings endowed with a rank one Krull valuation. Here we can discuss about tropical algebraic varieties, and (algebraic) tropical Gröbner bases can be used to compute them in an effective way, as well as tropicalizations of usual algebraic varieties, and \item rings endowed with a finite family of derivations. Then we can discuss about differential algebraic geometry, in which certain power series solutions to systems of algebraic differential equations are reformulated as sets of zeroes associated to differential ideals in a differential ring of differential polynomials. Here, the concept of differential Gröbner basis can be used to study the structure of the set of such solutions. \end{enumerate} The recently introduced branch of tropical differential algebra, as well as the concept of tropical differential Gröbner basis for differential ideals under discussion, can be seen as a mixture of the above two adaptations, and as such, the concepts and methods are a combination of both. This was initiated by D. Grigoriev with the purpose of studying combinatorial aspects of univariate power series solutions to (ordinary and algebraic) differential equations with coefficients in a ring of univariate power series. As stated above, the paper considers differential polynomials with coefficients in the differential field \(K(\!(t)\!)\) of rational functions with coefficients in a field \(K\) of characteristic zero, equipped with the usual derivation and \(t\)-adic valuation. The main technical concept is the definition of an \textit{initial} (form) of a differential polynomial with respect to a particular vector of supports \(S\subset\mathbb{N}^n\), which is done by introducing some valuations on the ring of differential polynomials which extend the \(t\)-adic valuation of \(K(\!(t)\!)\). An important result is that they extend the fundamental theorem of tropical differential algebraic geometry in the following way: a differential ideal \(I\) has a solution with vector of supports \(S\subset\mathbb{N}^n\) if and only the tropical initial ideal \(in_S(I)\) with respect to \(S\) is monomial-free. The main result is a complete algorithm to compute the (finite) tropical differential Gröbner basis for differential ideals generated by homogeneous linear differential polynomials with constant coefficients, and for a particular vector of supports of the solution (\(S=s\mathbb{N}^n\) for \(s \in \mathbb{N}\)). This is Algorithm Tr-DGB in Section 4. For the general case, they give a description of the tropical differential Gröbner basis of a differential ideal in terms of algebraic tropical Gröbner basis of it. They give a lower bound for the number of derivations of a finite set of differential polynomials such that the union of all of these sets is a differential basis for the differential ideal that they generate. Based on these observations, they propose a general Buchberger style algorithm to compute a tropical Gröbner basis for a general differential ideal, and they conjecture that this procedure computes such basis for differential ideals for which this basis turns out to be finite.