Surjectivity of polynomial maps on matrices (Q6914917)

Since the 18th century, when Waring formulated a problem of representation of a natural number as a sum of powers, tons of literature appeared where various versions of this question were treated in commutative and non-commutative settings. The authors of the paper under review consider yet another non-commutative generalization of the Waring problem. Namely, their main object is a diagonal form \(f\) in \(m\) non-commuting variables defined over a field \(K\). The values of \(f\) are computed on \(m\)-tuples of elements of an associative algebra \(A\). The focus is on the case where \(A\) is a matrix algebra over \(K\) and \(K\) is either real, or complex, or finite. (The case where \(K\) is the ring of Hamiltonian quaternions is also considered.) The paper contains a number of surjectivity results for the evaluation map induced by \(f\).