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Monday, April 30, 2012 - 4:00pm

Bernd Sturmfels

UC Berkeley

Location

Drexel University

Bossone Building, Atrium (3rd Floor)

In tropical arithmetic, the sum of two numbers is their maximum and the product of two numbers is their usual sum. Many results familiar from algebra and geometry, including the Quadratic Formula, the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra, and Bezout's Theorem, continue to hold in the tropical world. In this lecture we learn how to draw tropical curves and why evolutionary biologists might care about this.