Toric intersection theory for affine root counting (Q1295703)

Consider a system of \(n\) polynomial equations in \(n\) variables over an algebraically closed field \(K\), where the occurring monomials are fixed and the coefficients are ``generic''. In this paper formulae for the number of roots of such a system in any \(K^*\)-stable subset of the affine space \(K^n\) are given. There are two main results, a recursion over ``shifted'' and lower-dimensional systems (main theorem I), and an expression for a special situation in terms of mixed volumes (affine point theorem II). The paper also contains a characterization of ``genericity'' of the coefficients in terms of sparse resultants (main theorem II). Moreover, for the case of affine space minus an arbitrary union of coordinate hyperplanes, the formulae yield upper bounds on the number of possible isolated roots. With some examples, the author illustrates that those bounds are sharper than the ones obtained from previously known results. There are two main new ideas, one is to construct from the Newton-polytopes of the given system a suitable projective toric compactification for \(K^n\), and the other is to consider ``shifts'' of the modified polytopes to take into account roots in certain coordinate subspaces.