Exploring tropical differential equations

Abstract The purpose of this paper is fourfold. The first is to develop the theory of tropical differential algebraic geometry from scratch; the second is to present the tropical fundamental theorem for differential algebraic geometry, and show how it may be used to extract combinatorial information about the set of power series solutions to a given system of differential equations, both in the archimedean (complex analytic) and in the non-Archimedean (e.g., p-adic) setting. A third and subsidiary aim is to show how tropical differential algebraic geometry is a natural application of semiring theory, and in so doing, contribute to the valuative study of differential algebraic geometry. We use this formalism to extend the fundamental theorem of partial differential algebraic geometry to the differential fraction field of the ring of formal power series in arbitrarily (finitely many variables; in doing so we produce new examples of non-Krull valuations that merit further study in their own right.