The Boundary of Amoebas

Abstract

The computation of amoebas has been a challenging open problem for the last dozen years. The most natural approach, namely to compute an amoeba via its boundary, has not been practical so far since only a superset of the boundary, the contour, is understood in theory and computable in practice. We define and characterize the extended boundary of an amoeba, which is sensitive to some degenerations that the topological boundary does not detect. Our description of the extended boundary also allows us to distinguish between the contour and the boundary. This gives rise not only to new structural results in amoeba theory, but in particular allows us to compute hypersurface amoebas via their boundary in any dimension. In dimension two this can be done using Gr\"obner bases alone. We introduce the concept of amoeba bases, which are sufficient for understanding the amoeba of an ideal. We show that our characterization of the boundary is essential for the computation of these amoeba bases and we illustrate the potential of this concept by constructing amoeba bases for linear systems of equations.