Engineered complete intersections: slightly degenerate Bernstein--Kouchnirenko--Khovanskii

In this book we describe an approach through toric geometry to the following problem: "estimate the number (counted with appropriate multiplicity) of isolated solutions of n polynomial equations in n variables over an algebraically closed field k." The outcome of this approach is the number of solutions for "generic" systems in terms of their "Newton polytopes," and an explicit characterization of what makes a system "generic." The pioneering work in this field was done in th...

A generic polynomial f(x,y,z) with a prescribed Newton polytope defines a symmetric spatial curve f(x,y,z)=f(y,x,z)=0. We study its geometry: the number, degree and genus of its irreducible components, the number and type of singularities, etc. and discuss to what extent these results generalize to higher dimension and more complicated symmetries. As an application, we characterize generic one-parameter families of complex univariate polynomials, whose Galois group is a com...

Solving systems of polynomial equations is a central problem in nonlinear and computational algebra. Since Buchberger's algorithm for computing Gr\"obner bases in the 60s, there has been a lot of progress in this domain. Moreover, these equations have been employed to model and solve problems from diverse disciplines such as biology, cryptography, and robotics. Currently, we have a good understanding of how to solve generic systems from a theoretical and algorithmic point of ...

This paper deals with properties of the algebraic variety defined as the set of zeros of a "typical" sequence of polynomials. We consider various types of "nice" varieties: set-theoretic and ideal-theoretic complete intersections, absolutely irreducible ones, and nonsingular ones. For these types, we present a nonzero "obstruction" polynomial of explicitly bounded degree in the coefficients of the sequence that vanishes if its variety is not of the type. Over finite fields, t...

Consider a system F of n polynomial equations in n unknowns, over an algebraically closed field of arbitrary characteristic. We present a fast method to find a point in every irreducible component of the zero set Z of F. Our techniques allow us to sharpen and lower prior complexity bounds for this problem by fully taking into account the monomial term structure. As a corollary of our development we also obtain new explicit formulae for the exact number of isolated roots of F ...

Let K(X) be the collection of all non-zero finite dimensional subspaces of rational functions on an n-dimensional irreducible variety X. For any n-tuple L_1,..., L_n in K(X), we define an intersection index [L_1,..., L_n] as the number of solutions in X of a system of equations f_1 = ... = f_n = 0 where each f_i is a generic function from the space L_i. In counting the solutions, we neglect the solutions x at which all the functions in some space L_i vanish as well as the sol...

The Bernshtein-Kushnirenko-Khovanskii theorem provides a generic root count for system of Laurent polynomials in terms of the mixed volume of their Newton polytopes (i.e., the BKK bound). A recent and far-reaching generalization of this theorem is the study of birationally invariant intersection index by Kaveh and Khovanskii. This short note establishes a simple geometric condition on the equality between the BKK bound and the intersection index for a system of vector spaces ...

We explicitly characterize when the Milnor number at the origin of a polynomial or power series (over an algebraically closed field k of arbitrary characteristic) is the minimum of all polynomials with the same Newton diagram, which completes works of Kushnirenko (Invent. Math., 1976) and Wall (J. Reine Angew. Math., 1999). Given a fixed collection of n convex integral polytopes in R^n, we also give an explicit characterization of systems of n polynomials supported at these p...

The well-known Bernstein-Kushnirenko theorem from the theory of Newton polyhedra relates algebraic geometry and the theory of mixed volumes. Recently the authors have found a far-reaching generalization of this theorem to generic systems of algebraic equations on any quasi-projective variety. In the present note we review these results and their applications to algebraic geometry and convex geometry.

Let $ e_1, ..., e_c $ be positive integers and let $ Y \subseteq \mathbb{P}^n$ be the monomial complete intersection defined by the vanishing of $x_1^{e_1}, ..., x_c^{e_c}$. In this paper we study sharp upper bounds on the number of equations and syzygies of subschemes parametrized by the Hilbert scheme of points $Hilb^d(Y)$, and discuss applications to the Hilbert scheme of points $Hilb^d(X)$ of arbitrary complete intersections $X \subseteq \mathbb{P}^n$.