Uniform Determinantal Representations

The problem of expressing a specific polynomial as the determinant of a square matrix of affine-linear forms arises from algebraic geometry, optimization, complexity theory, and scientific computing. Mo- tivated by recent developments in this last area, we introduce the notion of a uniform determinantal representation, not of a single polynomial but rather of all polynomials in a given number of variables and of a given maximal degree. We derive a lower bound on the size of the matrix, and present a construction achieving that lower bound up to a constant factor as the number of variables is fixed and the degree grows. This construction marks an improvement upon a recent construction due to Plestenjak and Hochstenbach, and we investigate the performance of new representations in their root-finding technique for bivariate systems. Furthermore, we relate uniform determinantal repre- sentations to vector spaces of singular matrices, and we conclude with a number of future research directions.