>What you are seeing is someone who previously did pure mathematics wheel out a personal obsession and then (unwisely) chastise people for not caring about it.

>What you are seeing is someone who previously did pure mathematics wheel out a personal obsession and then (unwisely) chastise people for not caring about it. Hanlon's Razor suggests it's more likely that tropical algebra is just one of a relatively few examples of rail planning theory that the author is familiar with, not that he has a pernicious drive to promote the study. As I understand it, it mostly is a transformation of expressions like: Exp(vars, max(,), plus(,)) to give expressions like Exp(vars, plus(,), times(,)) where solutions to the latter can give solutions to the former under some conditions. It seems plausible that some specialized versions could be explained to someone with a reasonably good understanding of high school math. New math doesn't have to be abstruse. But all I know is I ran into a tropical algebra problem once and it was intractable.