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Seminar on Algebra and Geometry

Date:
-
Location:
745 Patterson Office Tower
Speaker(s) / Presenter(s):
Yoav Len, Yale University

Title:  Tropical plane quartics

Abstract:  I will begin with a brief introduction to tropical geometry, and explain how algebraic curves give rise to tropical curves. I will then show that every tropical plane quartic admits 7 families of bitangent lines. This is analogous to the remarkable fact in classical geometry that a smooth plane quartic has exactly 28 bitangent lines. While the proof is purely combinatorial, I will discuss recent developments which suggest that the classical and tropical results are closely related. This is joint work with Matt Baker, Ralph Morrison, Nathan Pflueger, and Qingchun Ren.