Components and codimension of mixed and $\mathscr{A}$-discriminants for square polynomial systems (2501.15832v1)

Abstract: The discriminant of a multivariate polynomial with indeterminate coefficients is not necessarily a hypersurface, and characterizing its codimension was an open problem for quite a while. We resolve this problem for discriminants of square and overdetermined systems of equations. This version is more involved, in the sense that the discriminant may have several components of different dimension. We enumerate all components and find their dimension and degree, for each of the three conventional ways to formalize the notion of the discriminant in this setting (namely, for mixed, Cayley and $\mathscr{A}$-discriminants).