Counting real connected components of trinomial curve intersections and \(m\)-nomial hypersurfaces (Q1434250)

The authors prove that any pair of bivariate trinomials has at most five isolated roots in the positive quadrant. The earlier bound based on Khovanskii's theory of fewnomials was much larger (248 832). An example due to B. Hass shows that the bound of the authors is the optimal one. The authors also give sharper bounds for systems of two real bivariate polynomials, one of them being a trinomial and sharpened bound for systems of \(n\)-variate polynomials having few terms. Finally as an interesting generalization of the Descartes rule they show a bound for the number of connected components of the zero set in \(\mathbb R^n_+\) of a single sparse polynomial with arbitrary number of variables. This interesting and very well written paper is dedicated to the memory of Konstantin Alexandrovich Sevast'yanov.