Some remarks about Descartes' rule of signs

What can we deduce about the roots of a real polynomial in one variable by simply considering the signs of its coefficients? On one hand, we give a complete answer concerning the positive roots, by proposing a statement of Descartes' rule of signs which strengthens the available ones while remaining as elementary and concise as the original. On the other hand, we provide new kinds of restrictions on the combined numbers of positive and negative roots.Comment: 10 page

Beyond Descartes' rule of signs

We consider real univariate polynomials with all roots real. Such a polynomial with $c$ sign changes and $p$ sign preservations in the sequence of its coefficients has $c$ positive and $p$ negative roots counted with multiplicity. Suppose that all moduli of roots are distinct; we consider them as ordered on the positive half-axis. We ask the question: If the positions of the sign changes are known, what can the positions of the moduli of negative roots be? We prove several new results which show how far from trivial the answer to this question is

Descartes' rule of signs, Newton polygons, and polynomials over hyperfields

We develop a theory of multiplicities of roots for polynomials over hyperfields and use this to provide a unified and conceptual proof of both Descartes' rule of signs and Newton's "polygon rule".Comment: 21 pages. v2: Revised the exposition and organization of the paper, corrected some minor typos. v3: Revised according to referee report, added new reference

Descartes' Rule of Signs for Polynomial Systems supported on Circuits

We give a multivariate version of Descartes' rule of signs to bound the number of positive real roots of a system of polynomial equations in n variables with n+2 monomials, in terms of the sign variation of a sequence associated both to the exponent vectors and the given coefficients. We show that our bound is sharp and is related to the signature of the circuit.Comment: 25 pages, 3 figure

Polynomials that Sign Represent Parity and Descartes' Rule of Signs

A real polynomial $P(X_1,..., X_n)$ sign represents $f: A^n \to \{0,1\}$ if for every $(a_1, ..., a_n) \in A^n$, the sign of $P(a_1,...,a_n)$ equals $(-1)^{f(a_1,...,a_n)}$. Such sign representations are well-studied in computer science and have applications to computational complexity and computational learning theory. In this work, we present a systematic study of tradeoffs between degree and sparsity of sign representations through the lens of the parity function. We attempt to prove bounds that hold for any choice of set $A$. We show that sign representing parity over $\{0,...,m-1\}^n$ with the degree in each variable at most $m-1$ requires sparsity at least $m^n$. We show that a tradeoff exists between sparsity and degree, by exhibiting a sign representation that has higher degree but lower sparsity. We show a lower bound of $n(m -2) + 1$ on the sparsity of polynomials of any degree representing parity over $\{0,..., m-1\}^n$. We prove exact bounds on the sparsity of such polynomials for any two element subset $A$. The main tool used is Descartes' Rule of Signs, a classical result in algebra, relating the sparsity of a polynomial to its number of real roots. As an application, we use bounds on sparsity to derive circuit lower bounds for depth-two AND-OR-NOT circuits with a Threshold Gate at the top. We use this to give a simple proof that such circuits need size $1.5^n$ to compute parity, which improves the previous bound of ${4/3}^{n/2}$ due to Goldmann (1997). We show a tight lower bound of $2^n$ for the inner product function over $\{0,1\}^n \times \{0, 1\}^n$.Comment: To appear in Computational Complexit

New Aspects of Descartes’ Rule of Signs

Below, we summarize some new developments in the area of distribution of roots and signs of real univariate polynomials pioneered by R. Descartes in the middle of the seventeenth century

On Descartes' rule of signs for hyperbolic polynomials

We consider univariate real polynomials with all roots real and with two sign changes in the sequence of their coefficients which are all non-vanishing. One of the changes is between the linear and the constant term. By Descartes' rule of signs, such degree $d$ polynomials have $2$ positive and $d-2$ negative roots. We consider the sequences of the moduli of their roots on the real positive half-axis. When the moduli are distinct, we give the exhaustive answer to the question at which positions can the moduli of the two positive roots be