Essentials of Tropical Combinatorics

The goal of this book is to explain, at the graduate student level, how tropical geometry can be accessed via geometric combinatorics. This way the book offers a viable path to a topic of very active research. At the same time the reader learns how a number of seemingly unrelated combinatorial results fall into place, once viewed through the "tropical lens". No attempt is made to cover the entire field of tropical geometry, which has been evolving too rapidly anyway to be covered by a book so small.