This article, along with [Elkadi and Mourrain 1996], explain the correlation between residue theory and the Dixon matrix, which yields an alternative method for studying and approximating all common solutions. In 1916, Macaulay [1916] constructed a matrix whose determinant is a multiple of the classical resultant for n homogeneous polynomials in n variables. The Macaulay matrix si16 multaneously generalizes the Sylvester matrix and the coefficient matrix of a system of linear equations [Kapur and Lakshman Y. N. 1992]. As the Dixon formulation, the Macaulay determinant is a multiple of the resultant. Macaulay, however, proved that a certain minor of his matrix divides the matrix determinant so as to yield the exact resultant in the case of generic homogeneous polynomials. Canny [1990] has invented a general method that perturbs any polynomial system and extracts a non-trivial projection operator. Using recent results pertaining to sparse polynomial systems [Gelfand et al. 1994, Sturmfels 1991], a matrix formula for computing the sparse resultant of n + 1 polynomials in n variables was given by Canny and Emiris [1993] and consequently improved in [Canny and Pedersen 1993, Emiris and Canny 1995]. The determinant of the sparse resultant matrix, like the Macaulay and Dixon matrices, only yields a projection operation, not the exact resultant. Here, sparsity means that only certain monomials in each of the n + 1 polynomials have non-zero coefficients. Sparsity is measured in geometric terms, namely, by the Newton polytope

We provide a lower bound construction showing that the union of unit balls in has quadratic complexity, even if they all contain the origin. This settles a conjecture of Sharir.