We show that the tropical projective Grassmannian of planes is homeomorphic to a closed subset of the analytic Grassmannian in Berkovich's sense by constructing a continuous section to the tropicalization map. Our main tool is an explicit description of the algebraic coordinate rings of the toric strata of the Grassmannian. We determine the fibers of the tropicalization map and compute the initial degenerations of all the toric strata. As a consequence, we prove that the tropical multiplicities of all points in the tropical projective Grassmannian are equal to one. Finally, we determine a piecewise linear structure on the image of our section that corresponds to the polyhedral structure on the tropical projective Grassmannian.

The mixed discriminant of n Laurent polynomials in n variables is the irreducible polynomial in the coefficients which vanishes whenever two of the roots coincide. The Cayley trick expresses the mixed discriminant as an A-discriminant. We show that the degree of the mixed discriminant is a piecewise linear function in the Plücker coordinates of a mixed Grassmannian. An explicit degree formula is given for the case of plane curves.Dedicated to the memory of our friend Mikael Passare 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. 13P15, 14M25, 14T05, 52B20.

We use tropical geometry to compute the multidegree and Newton polytope of the hypersurface of a statistical model with two hidden and four observed binary random variables, solving an open question stated by Drton, Sturmfels and Sullivant in (Drton et al., 2009, Ch. VI, Problem 7.7). The model is obtained from the undirected graphical model of the complete bipartite graph K 2,4 by marginalizing two of the six binary random variables. We present algorithms for computing the Newton polytope of its defining equation by parallel walks along the polytope and its normal fan. In this way we compute vertices of the polytope. Finally, we also compute and certify its facets by studying tangent cones of the polytope at the symmetry classes of vertices. The Newton polytope has 17 214 912 vertices in 44 938 symmetry classes and 70 646 facets in 246 symmetry classes.

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