Ralph Morrison

Moduli of tropical plane curves

We study the moduli space of metric graphs that arise from tropical plane curves. There are far fewer such graphs than tropicalizations of classical plane curves. For fixed genus g, our moduli space is a stacky fan whose cones are indexed by regular unimodular triangulations of Newton polygons with g interior lattice points. It has dimension 2g+1 unless g≤3 or g=7. We compute these spaces explicitly for g≤5.

Bitangents of tropical plane quartic curves

We study smooth tropical plane quartic curves and show that they satisfy certain properties analogous to (but also different from) smooth plane quartics in algebraic geometry. For example, we show that every such curve admits either infinitely many or exactly 7 bitangent lines. We also prove that a smooth tropical plane quartic curve cannot be hyperelliptic.

Algorithms for Mumford curves

Mumford showed that Schottky subgroups of PGL ( 2 , K ) give rise to certain curves, now called Mumford curves, over a non-archimedean field K. Such curves are foundational to subjects dealing with non-archimedean varieties, including Berkovich theory and tropical geometry. We develop and implement numerical algorithms for Mumford curves over the field of p-adic numbers. A crucial and difficult step is finding a good set of generators for a Schottky group, a problem solved in this paper. This result allows us to design and implement algorithms for tasks such as: approximating the period matrices of the Jacobians of Mumford curves; computing the Berkovich skeleta of their analytifications; and approximating points in canonical embeddings. We also discuss specific methods and future work for hyperelliptic Mumford curves.

THE SPIRAL INDEX OF KNOTS

In this paper, we introduce two new invariants that are closely related to Milnor’s curvature-torsion invariant. The first, a particularly natural invariant called the spiral index of a knot, captures the number of local maxima in a knot projection that is free of inflection points. This invariant is sandwiched between the bridge and braid index of a knot, and captures more subtle properties. The second invariant, the projective superbridge index, provides a method of counting the greatest number of local maxima that occur in a given projection. In addition to investigating the relationships among these invariants, we use them to classify all those knots for which Milnor’s curvature-torsion invariant is 6π.