Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Smooth curves in the tropical plane correspond to unimodulartriangulations of lattice polygons. The skeleton of such a curve is ametric graph whose genus is the number of lattice points in the interior ofthe polygon. In this talk we report on work concerning the followingrealizability problem: Characterize all metric graphs that admit a planarrepresentation as a smooth tropical curve. For instance, about 29.5 percentof metric graphs of genus 3 have this property. (Joint work with SarahBrodsky, Michael Joswig, and Bernd Sturmfels.)