Strange duality and polar duality

Abstract

We describe a relation between Arnold's strange duality and a polar duality between the Newton polytopes which is mostly due to M.~Kobayashi. We show that this relation continues to hold for the extension of Arnold's strange duality found by C.~T.~C.~Wall and the author. By a method of Ehlers-Varchenko, the characteristic polynomial of the monodromy of a hypersurface singularity can be computed from the Newton diagram. We generalize this method to the isolated complete intersection singularities embraced in the extended duality. We use this to explain the duality of characteristic polynomials of the monodromy discovered by K.~Saito for Arnold's original strange duality and extended by the author to the other cases.