Generalization of Rational Root Theorem [closed]
Can the rational root theorem in univariate var
Dillan Gibbs
Answered question
2022-02-14
Generalization of Rational Root Theorem [closed]
Can the rational root theorem in univariate variable polynomial equations be extended to more than one variable? For instance could we apply it to
to find all possible rational roots? I am sure the obvious answer is no but is there any hint on how to find all possible rational roots say of this example?
Answer & Explanation
Jack Hobbs
Beginner2022-02-15Added 14 answers
As said in the comments: the answer is NO in general.
For your particular case, you can do the following thing.
We have
.
Soving is the same as solving , setting (it is easy to derive x,y from u, v. This is equivalent to
, that is , which is easy to solve. For , this is equivalent to solve . You then get u,v as a rational fraction of t, then you get x,y.
[The idea is that you have an affine conic, so you can reduce it to a "diagonal form", and then reduce to the easier case to a rational conic . This situation is well understood from quadratic form specialist, and you have systematic methods to solve this even if it can be a bit tricky. Here we are in a particularly nice situation.]
Dzikowiec5wa
Beginner2022-02-16Added 13 answers
Commenters have pointed to examples of why this won’t generalize. I’ll give a more theoretical reason. The trick of the rational root theorem is that it takes a polynomial of one variable and converts it to a homogenous polynomial of two variables, and then deduce things about the integer solutions of homogenous polynomial. For example, rational roots of correspond to integer solutions to , with .From there, we see y must be a factor of . But the GCD condition means y must divide 2. Similarly, x must divide 3. With multiple variables we can still homogenize. We get, in your equation: But we can only restrict to integers with , not pairwise relatively '. For example, if in the original equation, the roots are , the roots in the homogenous polynomial would be . And, in any event, we don’t know a factor of , so we don’t have a factor of . Indeed, , which are relatively ' if . So, the heart of it is that homogenous integer polynomials of two variables, x,y, have one term of the form and all other terms are divisible by y. There is no other common divisor for the other terms with more than one variable. But even if there is a common divisor, say: . you do get , but you don’t know all the solutions can reduce to an example with . So you can’t deduce . One final note is that homogeneous polynomials of more than 2 variables need not even have “lead coefficients.” For example: has no terms of the form . We can get similar examples with two variables, but they factor: .