Strength is bounded linearly by Birch rank

Let $f$ be a homogeneous polynomial over a field. For many fields, including number fields and function fields, we prove that the strength of $f$ is bounded above by a constant multiple of the Birch rank of $f.$ The constant depends only on the degree of $f$ and the absolute transcendence degree of the field. This is the first linear bound obtained for forms of degree greater than three, partially resolving a conjecture of Adiprasito, Kazhdan and Ziegler. Our result has applications for the Hardy-Littlewood circle method. The circle method yields an asymptotic formula for counting integral zeros of (collections of) homogeneous polynomials, provided the Birch rank is sufficiently large -- a natural geometric condition. Our main theorem implies that these formulas hold even if we only assume a similar lower bound on the strength of the (collection of) homogeneous polynomials -- an arithmetic condition which is a priori weaker. This answers questions of Cook-Magyar and Skinner, and also yields a new proof of a seminal result of Schmidt as a consequence of Birch's earlier work. Over finite fields we obtain a quasi-linear bound for partition rank of tensors in terms of analytic rank, improving Moshkovitz-Zhu's state of the art bound.