Tropical geometry is a relatively new area in mathematics, which might loosely be described as a piece-wise linear or skeletonized version of algebraic geometry. Its leading ideas had appeared in different forms in the earlier works of George M. Bergman and of Robert Bieri and John Groves, but only since the late 1990s has an effort been made to consolidate the basic definitions of the theory. This has been motivated by the applications to enumerative algebraic geometry found by Grigory Mikhalkin.