Josephine Yu

We study Ehrhart series with coefficients in Abelian group rings. This opens new enumeration applications and unifies earlier variants, in particular, polynomial weighted, $q$-weighted, and equivariant Ehrhart series.

We study real and positive tropicalizations of the varieties of low rank symmetric matrices over real or complex Puiseux series. We show that real tropicalization coincides with complex tropicalization for rank two and corank one cases. We also show that the two notions of positive tropicalization introduced by Speyer and Williams coincide for symmetric rank two matrices, but they differ for symmetric corank one matrices.

We generalize R. P. Stanley's celebrated theorem that the $h^\ast$-polynomial of the Ehrhart series of a rational polytope has nonnegative coefficients and is monotone under containment of polytopes. We show that these results continue to hold for weighted Ehrhart series where lattice points are counted with polynomial weights, as long as the weights are homogeneous polynomials decomposable as sums of products of linear forms that are nonnegative on the polytope. We also show nonnegativity of the $h^\ast$-polynomial as a real-valued function for a larger family of weights. We then target the case when the weight function is the square of a single (arbitrary) linear form. We show stronger results for two-dimensional convex lattice polygons and give concrete examples showing tightness of the hypotheses. As an application, we construct a counterexample to a conjecture by Berg, Jochemko, and Silverstein on Ehrhart tensor polynomials.

We show that the tropicalization of an irreducible d-dimensional variety over a field of characteristic 0 is (d-l)-connected through codimension one, where l is the dimension of the lineality space of the tropicalization. From this we obtain a higher connectivity result for skeleta of rational polytopes. We also prove a tropical analogue of the Bertini Theorem: the intersection of the tropicalization of an irreducible variety with a generic hyperplane is again the tropicalization of an irreducible variety.

In a recent and ongoing work, Baldwin and Klemperer explore a connection between tropical geometry and economics. They give a sufficient condition for the existence of competitive equilibrium in product-mix auctions of indivisible goods. This result, which we call the unimodularity theorem, can also be traced back to the work of Danilov, Koshevoy, and Murota in discrete convex analysis. We give a new proof of the unimodularity theorem via the classical unimodularity theorem in integer programming. We give a unified treatment of these results via tropical geometry and formulate a new sufficient condition for competitive equilibrium when there are only two types of products. Generalizations of our theorem in higher dimensions are equivalent to various forms of the Oda conjecture in algebraic geometry.