Degenerating plane curves via tropicalization

In my talk, I will describe how simultaneous stable reduction and tropical geometry can be used to construct degenerations of plane curves. This is the main ingredient in a new proof for irreducibility of Severi varieties of the projective plane. The crucial feature of this construction is that it works in positive characteristic, where the other known methods fail. The talk will be a follow up on last week’s talk and is based on joint work with Xiang He and Ilya Tyomkin.