Toric Generalized Characteristic Polynomials

J. Maurice Rojas (MIT)

The rebirth of resultants, especially through the work of Gelfand, Kapranov, and Zelevinsky on the sparse resultant, has lead to many important recent improvements within computational algebraic geometry. We illustrate a few of these techniques, focusing on a new toric variety version of the classical u-resultant. The object in the title of this talk is an extension of an idea due to Canny for handling degeneracies in the u-resultant.

A corollary of our results is an algorithm for solving n by n polynomial systems (over any algebraically closed field), with complexity close to quadratic in the number of roots.