English

The complexity of root-finding in orders

Rings and Algebras 2025-07-01 v2 Number Theory

Abstract

Given an order, a commutative ring whose additive group is free of finite rank, a natural computational question is whether a fixed univariate polynomial fZ[X]f \in \mathbb{Z}[X] has a root in this ring. In this paper, we show that the computational difficulty of this depends strongly on the arithmetic properties of ff. We show that with probability 1, determining whether ff has a root is NP-complete. For deg f3\text{deg } f \leq 3 we give a full classification of the computational complexity: some special ff admit a polynomial-time algorithm, and for all other ff the problem is NP-complete. Additionally, we prove the problem is undecidable for f=(X2+1)2f = (X^2+1)^2, conditional on Hilberts Tenth Problem for Q(i)\mathbb{Q}(i). The key ingredients for proving NP-completeness are a new source of NP-complete group-theoretic problems developed in previous work, and a full classification of cubic polynomials with discriminant divisible only by 33.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2101.06165,
  title  = {The complexity of root-finding in orders},
  author = {Pim Spelier},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.06165},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

20 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T22:12:23.973Z