Geometry in the tropical limit (Q453440)

This is a short survey of ideas, motivation and results of tropical geometry. The main objects of tropical geometry, tropical varieties, are piece-wise linear objects which can be viewed as limits of families of complex varieties. In coordinates, one passes from \(z(t)\) to \(\lim_{t\to\infty}\log_t|z(t)|\). One of the consequences is the loss of the argument (the phase) of \(z(t)\). The authors demonstrate a similar effect in the use of quasiclassical approximations of quantum systems: slowly changing high frequency of oscillations allows one to ignore the phase. Another consequence of the above (tropical) limit procedure is the conversion of the usual addition and multiplication into the maximum and addition, respectively (tropical addition and multiplication). This effect is illustrated via zero-temperature limit in thermodynamics. Thermodynamical motivations and interpretations recently entered geometric considerations, for example, amoebas of plane curves appear as limit shapes in dimer model, the statistical model enhances with Gibbs mearures (Kenyon, Okounkov, Sheffield). The authors conclude with a short description of tropical curves and of the correspondence between tropical and complex algebraic curves, and finally explain how this correspondence applies to computation of the Gromov-Witten and Welschinger invariants of the plane.