Tropical curves in $mathbb{R}^2$ correspond to metric planar graphs but not all planar graphs arise in this way. We describe several new classes of graphs which cannot occur. For instance, this yields a full combinatorial characterization of the tropically planar graphs of genus at most five.
In this paper we initiate the study of tropical Voronoi diagrams. We start out with investigating bisectors of finitely many points with respect to arbitrary polyhedral norms. For this more general scenario we show that bisectors of three points are homeomorphic to a non-empty open subset of Euclidean space, provided that certain degenerate cases are excluded. Specializing our results to tropical bisectors then yields structural results and algorithms for tropical Voronoi diagrams.
The convex grabbing game is a game where two players, Alice and Bob, alternate taking extremal points from the convex hull of a point set on the plane. Rational weights are given to the points. The goal of each player is to maximize the total weight over all points that they obtain. We restrict the setting to the case of binary weights. We show a construction of an arbitrarily large odd-sized point set that allows Bob to obtain almost 3/4 of the total weight. This construction answers a question asked by Matsumoto, Nakamigawa, and Sakuma in [Graphs and Combinatorics, 36/1 (2020)]. We also present an arbitrarily large even-sized point set where Bob can obtain the entirety of the total weight. Finally, we discuss conjectures about optimum moves in the convex grabbing game for both players in general.
We enumerate complex curves on toric surfaces of any given degree and genus, having a single cusp and nodes as their singularities, and matching appropriately many point constraints. The solution is obtained via tropical enumerative geometry. The same technique applies to enumeration of real plane cuspidal curves: We show that, for any fixed $rge1$ and $dge2r+3$, there exists a generic real $2r$-dimensional linear family of plane curves of degree $d$ in which the number of real $r$-cuspidal curves is asymptotically comparable with the total number of complex $r$-cuspidal curves in the family, as $dtoinfty$.
Consider the graph $mathbb{H}(d)$ whose vertex set is the hyperbolic plane, where two points are connected with an edge when their distance is equal to some $d>0$. Asking for the chromatic number of this graph is the hyperbolic analogue to the famous Hadwiger-Nelson problem about colouring the points of the Euclidean plane so that points at distance $1$ receive different colours. As in the Euclidean case, one can lower bound the chromatic number of $mathbb{H}(d)$ by $4$ for all $d$. Using spectral methods, we prove that if the colour classes are measurable, then at least $6$ colours are are needed to properly colour $mathbb{H}(d)$ when $d$ is sufficiently large.
Let $Gamma$ be a compact tropical curve (or metric graph) of genus $g$. Using the theory of tropical theta functions, Mikhalkin and Zharkov proved that there is a canonical effective representative (called a break divisor) for each linear equivalence class of divisors of degree $g$ on $Gamma$. We present a new combinatorial proof of the fact that there is a unique break divisor in each equivalence class, establishing in the process an integral version of this result which is of independent interest. As an application, we provide a geometric proof of (a dual version of) Kirchhoffs celebrated Matrix-Tree Theorem. Indeed, we show that each weighted graph model $G$ for $Gamma$ gives rise to a canonical polyhedral decomposition of the $g$-dimensional real torus ${rm Pic}^g(Gamma)$ into parallelotopes $C_T$, one for each spanning tree $T$ of $G$, and the dual Kirchhoff theorem becomes the statement that the volume of ${rm Pic}^g(Gamma)$ is the sum of the volumes of the cells in the decomposition.