Sparse resultants and straight-line programs

Abstract

We prove that the sparse resultant, redefined by D'Andrea and Sombra and by Esterov as a power of the classical sparse resultant, can be evaluated in a number of steps which is polynomial in its degree, its number of variables and the size of the exponents of the monomials in the Laurent polynomials involved in its definition. Moreover, we design a probabilistic algorithm of this order of complexity to compute a straight-line program that evaluates it within this number of steps.