Integral geometry is dedicated to the study of integral transforms mapping a function (or more generally, a tensor field) defined on a manifold to a family of its integrals over certain submanifolds. A classical example of such an operator is the Radon transform, mapping a function to its integrals over hyperplanes. Generalizations of that transform integrating along smooth curves and surfaces (circles, ellipses, spheres, etc) have been studied at great length for decades, but relatively little attention has been paid to transforms integrating along non-smooth trajectories. This talks will discuss some recent results about Radon-type transforms that have a “corner” in their paths of integration (broken rays, cones, and stars) and their relation to imaging techniques based on physics of scattered particles (Compton camera imaging, single scattering tomography, etc).

In the first part of the talk, it will be shown how the partition function in statistical mechanics can be interpreted as an algebraic variety. In accordance to earlier literature, the zero-temperature limit is equivalent to taking the tropical limit of the algebraic variety. Previous literature have also generalised the temperature parameter to an n-vector. Here, we show that in the case of n=2, the two components of this generalised quantity are the inverse temperature and inverse temperature times chemical potential, respectively. Other values of n can also be similarly interpreted as various intensive thermodynamic parameters. The second part of the talk concerns null geodesics in four dimensional spacetimes. In particular, we observe that the condition for null circular orbits defines an A-discriminantal variety. A theorem by Rojas and Rusek for A-discriminants leads to the interpretation that there are two branches of null circular orbits for certain classes of spacetimes. A physical consequence of this theorem is that light rings around generic black holes with non-degenerate horizons are unstable. [Joint work with Mounir Nisse]