Apolarity and canonical forms for homogeneous polynomials (Q1260768)

This well-written treatise surveys the development and current state of knowledge on algebraic dependence of sets of polynomials with coefficients in a field. The paper is dedicated to Bernt Lindström on his 60th birthday and, according to the introduction, the authors' purpose was to give ``a complete self-contained, updated introduction to the theory of canonical forms of polynomials, as it has been known to this day''. The text is divided into four sections including the comprehensive introduction as Section 1. In Section 2, some of the basic definitions of the theory of matroids are recalled together with some basic results concerning the algebraic dependence of polynomials and more generally of algebraic functions. In Section 3, some basic results concerning homogeneous polynomials over a field of characteristic 0 are presented, and particularly the concepts of apolarity and polarization are introduced and discussed. In the final Section 4, two main theorems on apolarity are proved, and some of their consequences and applications are discussed. Throughout the paper, particular instances of matroids arising in the theory of algebraic dependence are considered. These matroids were previously considered and studied by Bernt Lindström. The introduction of this paper concludes with the following desire of the authors concerning the future work on this problem: We hope that the present work will stimulate further work along these lines, and we hazard the guess that the method of apolarity will prove to be a powerful tool in invariant theory and computer algebra.