Tropicalization and irreducibility of Generalized Vandermonde Determinants

We find geometric and arithmetic conditions in order to characterize the irreducibility of the determinant of the generic Vandermonde matrix over the algebraic closure of any field k. We also characterize those determinants whose tropicalization with respect to the variables of a row is irreducible.Comment: 10 pages, AMSart. Revised version to appear in Proceedings of the AM

Modular Las Vegas Algorithms for Polynomial Absolute Factorization

Let f(X,Y) \in \ZZ[X,Y] be an irreducible polynomial over \QQ. We give a Las Vegas absolute irreducibility test based on a property of the Newton polytope of $f$, or more precisely, of $f$ modulo some prime integer $p$. The same idea of choosing a $p$ satisfying some prescribed properties together with $LLL$ is used to provide a new strategy for absolute factorization of $f(X,Y)$. We present our approach in the bivariate case but the techniques extend to the multivariate case. Maple computations show that it is efficient and promising as we are able to factorize some polynomials of degree up to 400

On the irreducibility of multivariate subresultants

Let $P_1,...,P_n$ be generic homogeneous polynomials in $n$ variables of degrees $d_1,...,d_n$ respectively. We prove that if $\nu$ is an integer satisfying ${\sum_{i=1}^n d_i}-n+1-\min\{d_i\}<\nu,$ then all multivariate subresultants associated to the family $P_1,...,P_n$ in degree $\nu$ are irreducible. We show that the lower bound is sharp. As a byproduct, we get a formula for computing the residual resultant of $\binom{\rho-\nu +n-1}{n-1}$ smooth isolated points in \PP^{n-1}.Comment: Updated version, 4 pages, to appear in CRA