Related papers: Existence of positive definite noncoercive sums of…

We show that every real nonnegative polynomial $f$ can be approximated as closely as desired by a sequence of polynomials $\{f_\epsilon\}$ that are sums of squares. Each $f_\epsilon$ has a simple et explicit form in terms of $f$ and…

The relationship between nonnegative polynomials and sums of squares is one of the central questions in real algebraic geometry. A modern approach is to look at nonnegative polynomials and sums of squares on a real variety. We survey the…

We ask whether every polynomial function that is non-negative on a real algebraic curve can be expressed as a sum of squares in the coordinate ring. Scheiderer has classified all irreducible curves for which this is the case. For reducible…

We consider two seemingly unrelated questions: the relationship between nonnegative polynomials and sums of squares on real varieties, and sparse semidefinite programming. This connection is natural when a real variety $X$ is defined by a…

This paper presents a family of rapidly convergent summation formulas for various finite sums of the form $\sum_{k=0}^{\lfloor x\rfloor}f(k)$, where $x$ is a positive real number.

We construct families of explicit polynomials f with rational coefficients that are sums of squares of polynomials over the real numbers, but not over the rational numbers. Whether or not such examples exist was an open question originally…

In this paper, we obtain formulas for the number of representations of positive integers as sums of arbitrarily many squares (and other polygonal numbers) with a certain natural weighting. The resulting weighted sums give Fourier…

Positive and negative quadratic forms are well known and widely used. They are multivariate homogeneous polynomials of degree two taking positive or negative values respectively for any values of their arguments not all zero. In the present…

This paper proposes an elementary solution to a special case of finding all perfect squares that can be written as sum of consecutive integer cubes. It is shown that there are no non-trivial solutions if the perfect square is a prime power,…

For any positive integer $r$, we construct a smooth complex projective rational surface which has at least $r$ real forms not isomorphic over $\mathbb{R}$.

In the smallest cases where there exist nonnegative polynomials that are not sums of squares we present a complete explanation of this distinction. The fundamental reason that the cone of sums of squares is strictly contained in the cone of…

In this paper, we consider whether existence of a sums-of-squares formula depends on the base field. We reformulate the question of existence as a question in algebraic geometry. We show that, for large enough p, existence of…

We present an example of a strictly positive polynomial with rational coefficients that can be decomposed as a sum of squares of polynomials over $\R$ but not over $\Q$. This answers an open question by C. Scheiderer posed as the second…

We investigate the quantitative relationship between nonnegative polynomials and sums of squares of polynomials. We show that if the degree is fixed and the number of variables grows then there are significantly more nonnegative polynomials…

The aim of this note is to show that certain number theoretic inequalities due to Nesbitt and Shapiro have noncommutative counterparts involving positive definite matrices.

We study the quantitative relationship between the cones of nonnegative polynomials, cones of sums of squares and cones of sums of powers of linear forms. We derive bounds on the volumes (raised to the power reciprocal to the ambient…

Motivated by scheme theory, we introduce strong nonnegativity on real varieties, which has the property that a sum of squares is strongly nonnegative. We show that this algebraic property is equivalent to nonnegativity for nonsingular real…

Let $\F$ be the finite field of odd prime power order $q$, We find explicit expressions for the number of triples $\{\al-1,\al,\al+1 \}$ of consecutive non-zero squares in $\F$ and similarly for the number of triples of consecutive…

A celebrated result by Hilbert says that every real nonnegative ternary quartic is a sum of three squares. We show more generally that every nonnegative quadratic form on a real projective variety $X$ of minimal degree is a sum of…

Let $f$ be a complex valued function on a finite field $F$ such that $f(0) = 0$, $f(1) = 1$, and $|f(x)| = 1$ for $x \neq 0$. Cohn asked if it follows that $f$ is a nontrivial multiplicative character provided that $\sum_{x \in F} f(x)…