Software for the Gale transform of fewnomial systems and a Descartes rule for fewnomials (Q312198)

Let \(\mathbb{R}^\times:=\mathbb{R}\setminus\{0\}\) and let \(F:(\mathbb{R}^\times)^n\to\mathbb{R}\) be a map defined by Laurent polynomials having \(n+\ell\) distinct monomials, none of which is constant. In the paper under review a method to approximate the real solutions of the fewnomial system \(F(x)=b\), for a given \(b\in\mathbb{R}^n\), is described. Denote by \(S_F\subset\mathbb{R}^n\) the set of real solutions of the system \(F(x)=b\), and suppose that it is finite. To find approximations to all the points of \(S_F\), the authors rely on the notion of Gale duality for polynomial systems, which is a correspondence between systems of polynomials defining complete intersections in the torus and systems of master functions defining complete intersections on a complement of certain hyperplane arrangements (see [\textit{F. Bihan} and \textit{F. Sottile}, Ann. Inst. Fourier 58, No. 3, 877--891 (2008; Zbl 1243.14044)]). Applying Gale duality, the authors obtain a dual Gale system \(G(y)=1\), defined by certain rational functions. Then approximations \(S_G^*\) of the real solutions \(S_G\) of the system \(G(y)=1\) in the positive chamber \(\Delta\subset\mathbb{R}^\ell\) of the hyperplane arrangement under consideration are computed using a Khovanskii-Rolle continuation algorithm ([\textit{D. J. Bates} and \textit{F. Sottile}, Found. Comput. Math. 11, No. 5, 563--587 (2011; Zbl 1231.14047)]). This method traces real curves connecting the real solutions of certain start system to the points of \(S_G^*\). Finally, these approximations are used to obtain approximations \(S_F^*\) of the points of the set \(S_F\). As the number of curves traced by the Khovanskii-Rolle method is essentially bounded above by any fewnomial bound for real solutions, the authors obtain an improved fewnomial bound for the kind of systems under consideration. Then they describe the first and third steps of the method above, and comment on an implementation in the software package \texttt{galeDuality}.