Elimination Theory in Codimension Two

It has by now become a standard approach to use the theory of sparse (or toric) elimination, based on the Newton polytope of a polynomial, in order to reveal and exploit the structure of algebraic systems. This talk surveys compact formulae, including older and recent results, in sparse elimination. We start with root bounds and juxtapose two recent formulae: a generating function of the m-B{\'e}zout bound and a closed-form expression for the mixed volume by means of a matrix...

These are the notes from a survey talk given at Arbeitstagung 2001 covering the author's work with Lev Borisov and Sorin Popescu on toric varieties, modular forms, and equations of modular curves.

We illustrate an efficient new method for handling polynomial systems with degenerate solution sets. In particular, a corollary of our techniques is a new algorithm to find an isolated point in every excess component of the zero set (over an algebraically closed field) of any $n$ by $n$ system of polynomial equations. Since we use the sparse resultant, we thus obtain complexity bounds (for converting any input polynomial system into a multilinear factorization problem) which ...

Some diophantine aspects of projective toric varieties: We present several faces of projective toric varieties, of interest from the point of view of diophantine geometry. We make explicit the theory on a number of meaningful examples and we also prove a Bezout type theorem for Chow weight of projective varieties.

We present examples which show that in dimension higher than one or codimension higher than two, there exist toric ideals I_A such that no binomial ideal contained in I_A and of the same dimension is a complete intersection. This result has important implications in sparse elimination theory and in the study of the Horn system of partial differential equations.

In this survey I summarize the constructions of toric degenerations obtained from valuations and Gr\"obner theory and describe in which sense they are equivalent. I show how adapted bases can be used to generalize the classical Newton polytope to what is called a $\mathbb B$-Newton polytope. The $\mathbb B$-Newton polytope determines the Newton--Okounkov polytopes of all Khovanskii-finite valuations sharing the adapted standard monomial basis $\mathbb B$.

This paper reexamines univariate reduction from a toric geometric point of view. We begin by constructing a binomial variant of the $u$-resultant and then retailor the generalized characteristic polynomial to fully exploit sparsity in the monomial structure of any given polynomial system. We thus obtain a fast new algorithm for univariate reduction and a better understanding of the underlying projections. As a corollary, we show that a refinement of Hilbert's Tenth Problem is...

We give the first exact determinantal formula for the resultant of an unmixed sparse system of four Laurent polynomials in three variables with arbitrary support. This follows earlier work by the author on exact formulas for bivariate systems and also uses the exterior algebra techniques of Eisenbud and Schreyer. Along the way we will prove an interesting new vanishing theorem for the sheaf cohomology of divisors on toric varieties. This will allow us to describe some support...

We study elimination theory in the context of Newton polytopes and develop its convex-geometric counterpart.

We discuss a categorical approach to the theory of discriminants in the combinatorial language introduced by Gelfand, Kapranov and Zelevinsky. Our point of view is inspired by homological mirror symmetry and provides $K$--theoretic evidence for a conjecture presented by Paul Aspinwall in a conference talk in Banff in March 2016 and later in a joint paper with Plesser and Wang.