Irreducibility results for compositions of polynomials in several variables (Q2483770)

Let \(K\) be a field and \(f,g\) polynomials in \(K[x,y]\). The main theorem of this paper gives a condition on \(f\), \(g\) resulting in a bound for the number of irreducible factors of the composition \(f(x,g(x,y))\). If we write \(f(x,y)= \sum^m_{i=0} a_i(x) y^i\), \(g(x,y) = \sum^n_{i=0} b_i(x) y^i\), with \(a_i,b_i\in K[x]\) then the condition in this theorem is that \(\deg_x (a_m)\) should be larger than a certain combination of \(m\), \(n\) and \(\deg_x(a_i)\) for \(i < m\) and the degrees of known factors \(d_1\) and \(d_2\) of \(a_m\) and \(b_n\), respectively. Under this hypothesis the resulting bound is the sum of the number of irreducible factors of \(a_m/d_1\) and of \(b_n/d_2\). From this result irreducibility criteria are deduced for such compositions and also similar results for polynomials in more than \(2\) variables.