These are the lecture notes for ten lectures to be given at the CBMS

Many polynomial systems have solution sets comprising multiple irreducible components, possibly of dierent dimensions. A fundamental problem of numerical algebraic geometry is to decompose such a solution set, using oating-point numerical processes, into its components.

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We consider the problem of sparse interpolation of an approximate multivariate black-box polynomial in floating-point arithmetic. That is, both the inputs and outputs of the black-box polynomial have some error, and all numbers are represented in standard, fixed-precision, floating point arithmetic. By interpolating the black box evaluated at random primitive roots of unity, we give efficient and numerically robust solutions. We note the similarity between the exact Ben-Or/Tiwari sparse interpolation algorithm and the classical Prony’s method for interpolating a sum of exponential functions, and exploit the generalized eigenvalue reformulation of Prony’s method. We analyze the numerical stability of our algorithms and the sensitivity of the solutions, as well as the expected conditioning achieved through randomization. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques in practice through numerical experiments and applications. 1.

Abstract. A new rank revealing method is proposed. For a given matrix and a threshold for near-zero singular values, by employing a globally convergent iterative scheme as well as a deflation technique the method calculates approximate singular values below the threshold one by one and returns the approximate rank of the matrix along with an orthonormal basis for the approximate null space. When a row or column is inserted or deleted, algorithms for updating/downdating the approximate rank and null space are straightforward, stable and efficient. Numerical results exhibiting the advantages of our code over existing packages based on two-sided orthogonal rankrevealing decompositions are presented. Also presented are applications of the new algorithm in numerical computation of the polynomial GCD as well as identification of non-isolated zeros of polynomial systems.

Homotopy continuation methods have proven to be reliable and efficient to approximate all isolated solutions of polynomial systems. In this paper we show how we can use this capability as a blackbox device to solve systems which have positive dimensional components of solutions. We indicate how the software package PHCpack can be used in conjunction with Maple and programs written in C. We describe a numerically stable algorithm for decomposing positive dimensional solution sets of polynomial systems into irreducible components.

Abstract. We show how to use numerical continuation to compute the intersection C = A∩B of two algebraic sets A and B, where A, B, and C are numerically represented by witness sets. Enroute to this result, we first show how to find the irreducible decomposition of a system of polynomials restricted to an algebraic set. The intersection of components A and B then follows by considering the decomposition of the diagonal system of equations u − v = 0 restricted to {u, v} ∈ A × B. One offshoot of this new approach is that one can solve a large system of equations by finding the solution components of its subsystems and then intersecting these. It also allows one to find the intersection of two components of the two polynomial systems, which is not possible with any previous numerical continuation approach.

To classify positive dimensional solution components of a polynomial system, we construct polynomials interpolating points sampled from each component. In previous work, points on an i-dimensional component were linearly projected onto a generically chosen (i + 1)-dimensional subspace. In this paper, we present two improvements. First, we reduce the dimensionality of the ambient space by determining the linear span of the component and restricting to it. Second, if the dimension of the linear span is greater than i + 1, we use a less generic projection that leads to interpolating polynomials of lower degree, thus reducing the number of samples needed. While this more ecient approach still guarantees | with probability one | the correct determination of the degree of each component, the mere evaluation of an interpolating polynomial no longer certi es the membership of a point to that component. We present an additional numerical test that certi es membership in this new situation. We illustrate the performance of our new approach on some well-known test systems.

One can consider the problem of factoring multivariate complex polynomials as a special case of the decomposition of a pure dimensional solution set of a polynomial system into irreducible components. The importance and nature of this problem however justify a special treatment.