A construction of polynomials with squarefree discriminants

For any integer n >= 2 and any nonnegative integers r,s with r+2s = n, we give an unconditional construction of infinitely many monic irreducible polynomials of degree n with integer coefficients having squarefree discriminant and exactly r real roots. These give rise to number fields of degree n, signature (r,s), Galois group S_n, and squarefree discriminant; we may also force the discriminant to be coprime to any given integer. The number of fields produced with discriminant in the range [-N, N] is at least c N^(1/(n-1)). A corollary is that for each n \geq 3, infinitely many quadratic number fields admit everywhere unramified degree n extensions whose normal closures have Galois group A_n. This generalizes results of Yamamura, who treats the case n = 5, and Uchida and Yamamoto, who allow general n but do not control the real place.Comment: 10 pages; v2: refereed version, minor edits onl

Level sets and non Gaussian integrals of positively homogeneous functions

We investigate various properties of the sublevel set $\{x \,:\,g(x)\leq 1\}$ and the integration of $h$ on this sublevel set when $g$ and $h$are positively homogeneous functions. For instance, the latter integral reduces to integrating $h\exp(-g)$ on the whole space $R^n$ (a non Gaussian integral) and when $g$ is a polynomial, then the volume of the sublevel set is a convex function of the coefficients of $g$. In fact, whenever $h$ is nonnegative, the functional $\int \phi(g(x))h(x)dx$ is a convex function of $g$ for a large class of functions $\phi:R_+\to R$. We also provide a numerical approximation scheme to compute the volume or integrate $h$ (or, equivalently to approximate the associated non Gaussian integral). We also show that finding the sublevel set $\{x \,:\,g(x)\leq 1\}$ of minimum volume that contains some given subset $K$ is a (hard) convex optimization problem for which we also propose two convergent numerical schemes. Finally, we provide a Gaussian-like property of non Gaussian integrals for homogeneous polynomials that are sums of squares and critical points of a specific function