What does the Riemann-Roch theorem say in the tropical world?
Background: One way to approach this would be to build up the
machinery of line bundles (or maybe coherent sheaves?). A different,
more immediately geometric approach might be called the ``Brill-Noether''
approach. This requires only two ingredients:
- ``plane curve with ordinary nodes'' and
- If
,
and
are curves with a common point of intersection,
what is ``
'', the ``residual intersection of
in
''. If
is the local ring of
on
,
and
,
are the images in
of the equations of
and
, then
in the classical case the parts of the
intersections
and
supported at
are represented by the ideals
and
in
, and
the residual is represented by the ideal
The early work on Riemann-Roch treated only the case where
is smooth at
. Then
at
is represented just by
a multiplicity, and residuation is just subtraction. When
is arbitrary, things still work because
is a
Gorenstein
ring for any smooth curve, no matter how singular.
Question: How do these notions play out for tropical plane curves?
(contributed by David Eisenbud)
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