Symbolic homotopy construction (Q1261195)

In recent years there has been much interest in numerically finding all of the finite solutions to systems of polynomial equations. The classical theorem of Bézout gives an upper bound. The BKK (Bernstein, Kushnirenko, Khovanskij) bound based upon the mixed volume of the Newton polytopes of the components of a polynomial map generally gives a much lower bound. The present paper presents a symbolic way of computing the BKK bound and constructing a random product start system for a homotopy continuation method.