Real radical initial ideals

We explore the consequences of an ideal I of real polynomials having a real radical initial ideal, both for the geometry of the real variety of I and as an application to sums of squares representations of polynomials. We show that if in_w(I) is real radical for a vector w in the tropical variety, then w is in the logarithmic set of the real variety. We also give algebraic sufficient conditions for w to be in the logarithmic limit set of a more general semialgebraic set. If in addition the entries of w are positive, then the corresponding quadratic module is stable. In particular, if in_w(I) is real radical for some positive vector w then the set of sums of squares modulo I is stable. This provides a method for checking the conditions for stability given by Powers and Scheiderer.Comment: 16 pages, added examples, minor revision

Equations solvable by radicals in a uniquely divisible group

We study equations in groups G with unique m-th roots for each positive integer m. A word equation in two letters is an expression of the form w(X,A) = B, where w is a finite word in the alphabet {X,A}. We think of A,B in G as fixed coefficients, and X in G as the unknown. Certain word equations, such as XAXAX=B, have solutions in terms of radicals, while others such as XXAX = B do not. We obtain the first known infinite families of word equations not solvable by radicals, and conjecture a complete classification. To a word w we associate a polynomial P_w in Z[x,y] in two commuting variables, which factors whenever w is a composition of smaller words. We prove that if P_w(x^2,y^2) has an absolutely irreducible factor in Z[x,y], then the equation w(X,A)=B is not solvable in terms of radicals.Comment: 18 pages, added Lemma 5.2. To appear in Bull. Lon. Math. So

Maximum Likelihood for Matrices with Rank Constraints

Maximum likelihood estimation is a fundamental optimization problem in statistics. We study this problem on manifolds of matrices with bounded rank. These represent mixtures of distributions of two independent discrete random variables. We determine the maximum likelihood degree for a range of determinantal varieties, and we apply numerical algebraic geometry to compute all critical points of their likelihood functions. This led to the discovery of maximum likelihood duality between matrices of complementary ranks, a result proved subsequently by Draisma and Rodriguez.Comment: 22 pages, 1 figur

Quartic Curves and Their Bitangents

A smooth quartic curve in the complex projective plane has 36 inequivalent representations as a symmetric determinant of linear forms and 63 representations as a sum of three squares. These correspond to Cayley octads and Steiner complexes respectively. We present exact algorithms for computing these objects from the 28 bitangents. This expresses Vinnikov quartics as spectrahedra and positive quartics as Gram matrices. We explore the geometry of Gram spectrahedra and we find equations for the variety of Cayley octads. Interwoven is an exposition of much of the 19th century theory of plane quartics.Comment: 26 pages, 3 figures, added references, fixed theorems 4.3 and 7.8, other minor change

Minimum-weight triangulation is NP-hard

A triangulation of a planar point set S is a maximal plane straight-line graph with vertex set S. In the minimum-weight triangulation (MWT) problem, we are looking for a triangulation of a given point set that minimizes the sum of the edge lengths. We prove that the decision version of this problem is NP-hard. We use a reduction from PLANAR-1-IN-3-SAT. The correct working of the gadgets is established with computer assistance, using dynamic programming on polygonal faces, as well as the beta-skeleton heuristic to certify that certain edges belong to the minimum-weight triangulation.Comment: 45 pages (including a technical appendix of 13 pages), 28 figures. This revision contains a few improvements in the expositio

A computer algebra user interface manifesto

Many computer algebra systems have more than 1000 built-in functions, making expertise difficult. Using mock dialog boxes, this article describes a proposed interactive general-purpose wizard for organizing optional transformations and allowing easy fine grain control over the form of the result even by amateurs. This wizard integrates ideas including: * flexible subexpression selection; * complete control over the ordering of variables and commutative operands, with well-chosen defaults; * interleaving the choice of successively less main variables with applicable function choices to provide detailed control without incurring a combinatorial number of applicable alternatives at any one level; * quick applicability tests to reduce the listing of inapplicable transformations; * using an organizing principle to order the alternatives in a helpful manner; * labeling quickly-computed alternatives in dialog boxes with a preview of their results, * using ellipsis elisions if necessary or helpful; * allowing the user to retreat from a sequence of choices to explore other branches of the tree of alternatives or to return quickly to branches already visited; * allowing the user to accumulate more than one of the alternative forms; * integrating direct manipulation into the wizard; and * supporting not only the usual input-result pair mode, but also the useful alternative derivational and in situ replacement modes in a unified window.Comment: 38 pages, 12 figures, to be published in Communications in Computer Algebr

Implementing the asymptotically fast version of the elliptic curve primality proving algorithm

The elliptic curve primality proving (ECPP) algorithm is one of the current fastest practical algorithms for proving the primality of large numbers. Its running time cannot be proven rigorously, but heuristic arguments show that it should run in time O ((log N)^5) to prove the primality of N. An asymptotically fast version of it, attributed to J. O. Shallit, runs in time O ((log N)^4). The aim of this article is to describe this version in more details, leading to actual implementations able to handle numbers with several thousands of decimal digits