Homotopy techniques for solving sparse column support determinantal polynomial systems (Q1979422)

The paper introduces a homotopy continuation method for solving a polynomial system defined by a sequence of sparse polynomials and minors of a matrix. More concretely, given a sequence of polynomials \(\mathbf{g}=(g_1,\ldots,g_s)\) in \(\mathbb{K}[x_1,\ldots,x_n]^s\) and a polynomial matrix \(F=[f_{i,j}]\in \mathbb{K}[x_1,\ldots,x_n]^{p,q}\) with \(p\leq q\), the algorithm computes the isolated points of \(\mathcal{V}_p(F, \mathbf{g})\), the algebraic set of points in \(\mathbb{K}\) at which all polynomials in \(\mathbf{g}\) and all \(p\)-minors of \(F\) vanish, with \( n = q-p + s + 1\). Homotopy methods exploit the structure of the systems to compute their roots, and in this case, the authors take advantage on both the sparsity of the input polynomials and the determinantal structure, as it is shown in Example 6. The principle of homotopy continuation methods is quite simple; it involves constructing a second system defining the same variety which is similar but whose solutions are easy to describe. However, it is highly complicated to achieve good algorithms, with a good algebraic complexity, as it is in this case. That requires the manipulation and the use of symbolic computation and algebraic geometry tools.