arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Michael Joswig.
Fermat-Weber points with respect to an asymmetric tropical distance function are studied. It turns out that they correspond to the optimal solutions of a transportation problem. The results are applied to obtain a new method for computing consensus trees in phylogenetics. This method has several desirable properties; e.g., it is Pareto and co-Pareto on rooted triplets.
We propose to study the tropical geometry specifically arising from convergent Hahn series in multiple indeterminates. One application is a new view on stable intersections of tropical hypersurfaces. Another one is perturbations of rank one tropical polytopes, which is beneficial for algorithmic purposes.
We study a parametric version of the Fermat-Weber problem with respect to an asymmetric distance function, which occurs naturally in tropical geometry. Our results yield a method for constructing phylogenetic supertrees.
The difference set of an outcome in an auction is the set of types that the auction mechanism maps to the outcome. We give a complete characterization of the geometry of the difference sets that can appear for a dominant strategy incentive compatible multi-unit auction showing that they correspond to regular subdivisions of the unit cube. This observation is then used to construct mechanisms that are robust in the sense that the set of items allocated to a player does change only slightly when the player's reported type is changed slightly.
A longstanding goal of biology is to identify the key genes and species that critically impact evolution, ecology, and health. Network analysis has revealed keystone species that regulate ecosystems and master regulators that regulate cellular genetic networks. Yet these studies have focused on pairwise biological interactions, which can be affected by the context of genetic background and other species present generating higher-order interactions. The important regulators of higher-order interactions are unstudied. To address this, we applied a new high-dimensional geometry approach that quantifies epistasis in a fitness landscape to ask how individual genes and species influence the interactions in the rest of the biological network. We then generated and also reanalyzed 5-dimensional datasets (two genetic, two microbiome). We identified key genes (e.g. the rbs locus and pykF) and species (e.g. Lactobacilli) that control the interactions of many other genes and species. These higher-order master regulators can induce or suppress evolutionary and ecological diversification by controlling the topography of the fitness landscape. Thus, we provide mathematical intuition and justification for exploration of biological networks in higher dimensions.
We investigate the Voronoi diagrams with respect to an asymmetric tropical distance function, also for infinite point sets. These turn out to be much better behaved than the tropical Voronoi diagrams arising from the standard tropical distance, which is symmetric. In particular, we show that the asymmetric tropical Voronoi diagrams may be seen as tropicalizations of power diagrams over fields of real Puiseux series. Our results are then applied to rational lattices and Laurent monomial modules.
We study valuated matroids, their tropical incidence relations, flag matroids and total positivity. This leads to a characterization of permutahedral subdivisions, namely subdivisions of regular permutahedra into generalized permutahedra. Further, we get a characterization of those subdivisions arising from positive valuated flag matroids.
Results of Koebe (1936), Schramm (1992), and Springborn (2005) yield realizations of $3$-polytopes with edges tangent to the unit sphere. Here we study the algebraic degrees of such realizations. This initiates the research on constrained realization spaces of polytopes.
We report on an implementation of Galois groups in the new computer algebra system OSCAR. As an application we compute Galois groups of Ehrhart polynomials of lattice polytope
Sphere recognition is known to be undecidable in dimensions five and beyond, and no polynomial time method is known in dimensions three and four. Here we report on positive and negative computational results with the goal to explore the limits of sphere recognition from a practical point of view. An important ingredient are randomly constructed discrete Morse functions.
We investigate geometric embeddings among several classes of stacky fans and algorithms, e.g., to compute their homology. Interesting cases arise from moduli spaces of tropical curves. Specifically, we show that the tropical honeycomb curves form a contractible sub-locus in the moduli of all tropical $K_4$-curves.
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.
We study a family of convex polytopes, called SIM-bodies, which were introduced by Giannakopoulos and Koutsoupias (2018) to analyze so-called Straight-Jacket Auctions. First, we show that the SIM-bodies belong to the class of generalized permutahedra. Second, we prove an optimality result for the Straight-Jacket Auctions among certain deterministic auctions. Third, we employ computer algebra methods and mathematical software to explicitly determine optimal prices and revenues.
We study parameterized versions of classical algorithms for computing shortest-path trees. This is most easily expressed in terms of tropical geometry. Applications include shortest paths in traffic networks with variable link travel times.
Smooth tropical cubic surfaces are parametrized by maximal cones in the unimodular secondary fan of the triple tetrahedron. There are $344\, 843 \,867$ such cones, organized into a database of $14\,373\,645$ symmetry classes. The Schläfli fan gives a further refinement of these cones. It reveals all possible patterns of lines on tropical cubic surfaces, thus serving as a combinatorial base space for the universal Fano variety. This article develops the relevant theory and offers a blueprint for the analysis of big data in tropical geometry.
We present an algorithm to compute all $n$ nondominated points of a multicriteria discrete optimization problem with $d$ objectives using at most $\mathcal{O}(n^{\lfloor d/2 \rfloor})$ scalarizations. The method is similar to algorithms by Przybylski et al. (2010) and by Klamroth et al. (2015) with the same complexity. As a difference, our method employs a tropical convex hull computation, and it exploits a particular kind of duality which is special for the tropical cones arising. This duality can be seen as a generalization of the Alexander duality of monomial ideals.
We report on a recent implementation of patchworking and real tropical hypersurfaces in $\texttt{polymake}$. As a new mathematical contribution we provide a census of Betti numbers of real tropical surfaces.
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.