gfan

Compute Groebner fans and tropical varieties

Gfan is a software package for computing Gröbner fans and tropical varieties. These are polyhedral fans associated to polynomial ideals. The maximal cones of a Gröbner fan are in bijection with the marked reduced Gröbner bases of its defining ideal. The software computes all marked reduced Gröbner bases of an ideal. Their union is a universal Gröbner basis. The tropical variety of a polynomial ideal is a certain subcomplex of the Gröbner fan. Gfan contains algorithms for computing this complex for general ideals and specialized algorithms for tropical curves, tropical hypersurfaces and tropical varieties of prime ideals. In addition to the above core functions the package contains many tools which are useful in the study of Gröbner bases, initial ideals and tropical geometry. The full list of commands can be found in Appendix B of the manual. For ordinary Gröbner basis computations Gfan is not competitive in speed compared to programs such as CoCoA, Singular and Macaulay2.

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