Related papers: Bias implies low rank for quartic polynomials
We study the structure of bounded degree polynomials over finite fields. Haramaty and Shpilka [STOC 2010] showed that biased degree three or four polynomials admit a strong structural property. We confirm that this is the case for degree…
Let $f$ be a polynomial of degree $d$ in $n$ variables over a finite field $\mathbb{F}$. The polynomial is said to be unbiased if the distribution of $f(x)$ for a uniform input $x \in \mathbb{F}^n$ is close to the uniform distribution over…
In this paper we study the structure of polynomials of degree three and four that have high bias or high Gowers norm, over arbitrary prime fields. In particular we obtain the following results. 1. We give a canonical representation for…
A degree-$d$ polynomial $p$ in $n$ variables over a field $\F$ is {\em equidistributed} if it takes on each of its $|\F|$ values close to equally often, and {\em biased} otherwise. We say that $p$ has a {\em low rank} if it can be expressed…
In this paper we investigate the uniform distribution properties of polynomials in many variables and bounded degree over a fixed finite field F of prime order. Our main result is that a polynomial P : F^n -> F is poorly-distributed only if…
In this paper, we obtain several new factorization results for certain classes of polynomials having integer coefficients. In doing so, we use the information about prime factorization of the value taken up by such polynomials and their…
For an odd prime $p$, we say $f(X) \in {\mathbb F}_p[X]$ computes square roots in $\mathbb F_p$ if, for all nonzero perfect squares $a \in \mathbb F_p$, we have $f(a)^2 = a$. When $p \equiv 3 \mod 4$, it is well known that $f(X) =…
Given a global field K and a polynomial f defined over K of degree at least two, Morton and Silverman conjectured in 1994 that the number of K-rational preperiodic points of f is bounded in terms of only the degree of K and the degree of f.…
Let $\mathbb{F}_{q}$ be a finite field of characteristic $p$, and let $f \in \mathbb{F}_{q}[x]$ be a polynomial of degree $d > 0$. Denote the image set of this polynomial as $V_{f}=\{f(\alpha)\mid\alpha\in\mathbb{F}_{q}\}$ and denote the…
An open problem in complexity theory is to find the minimal degree of a polynomial representing the $n$-bit OR function modulo composite $m$. This problem is related to understanding the power of circuits with $\text{MOD}_m$ gates where $m$…
A regularity lemma for polynomials provides a decomposition in terms of a bounded number of approximately independent polynomials. Such regularity lemmas play an important role in numerous results, yet suffer from the familiar shortcoming…
These are the notes of my lectures at the 1996 European Congress of Mathematicians. {} Polynomials appear in mathematics frequently, and we all know from experience that low degree polynomials are easier to deal with than high degree ones.…
We study a conjecture called "linear rank conjecture" recently raised in (Tsang et al., FOCS'13), which asserts that if many linear constraints are required to lower the degree of a GF(2) polynomial, then the Fourier sparsity (i.e. number…
We study the number of prime polynomials of degree $n$ over $\mathbb{F}_q$ in which the $i^{th}$ coefficient is either preassigned to be $a_i \in \mathbb{F}_q$ or outside a small set $S_i \subset \mathbb{F}_q$. This serves as a function…
Let $p$ be a prime, let $1 \le t < d < p$ be integers, and let $S$ be a non-empty subset of $\mathbb{F}_p$. We establish that if a polynomial $P:\mathbb{F}_p^n \to \mathbb{F}_p$ with degree $d$ is such that the image $P(S^n)$ does not…
We present precise bit and degree estimates for the optimal value of the polynomial optimization problem $f^*:=\text{inf}_{x\in \mathscr{X}}~f(x)$, where $\mathscr{X}$ is a semi-algebraic set satisfying some non-degeneracy conditions. Our…
Let $f$ be a monic univariate polynomial. We say that $f$ is positive if $f(x)$ is positive over all $x > 0$. If all the coefficients of $f$ are non-negative, then $f$ is trivially positive. In 1883, Poincar\'e proved that $f$ is positive…
We study the bias of random bounded-degree polynomials over odd prime fields and show that, with probability exponentially close to 1, such polynomials have exponentially small bias. This also yields an exponential tail bound on the weight…
We give a lower bound for the degree of an irreducible factor of a given polynomial. This improves and generalizes the results obtained in [4, On the irreducible factors of a polynomial, Proc. Amer. Math. Soc., 148 (2020] 1429 -- 1437].
The sensitivity of a Boolean function f is the maximum over all inputs x, of the number of sensitive coordinates of x. The well-known sensitivity conjecture of Nisan (see also Nisan and Szegedy) states that every sensitivity-s Boolean…