Critical Points, Critical Values, and a Determinant Identity for Complex Polynomials

Abstract

Given any n-tuple of complex numbers, one can canonically define a polynomial of degree n+1 that has the entries of this n-tuple as its critical points. In 2002, Beardon, Carne, and Ng studied a map $\theta\colon \mathbb{C}^n\to \mathbb{C}^n$ which outputs the critical values of the canonical polynomial constructed from the input, and they proved that this map is onto. Along the way, they showed that $\theta$ is a local homeomorphism whenever the entries of the input are distinct and nonzero, and, implicitly, they produced a polynomial expression for the Jacobian determinant of $\theta$. In this article we extend and generalize both the local homeomorphism result and the elegant determinant identity to analogous situations where the critical points occur with multiplicities. This involves stratifying $\mathbb{C}^n$ according to which coordinates are equal and generalizing $\theta$ to a similar map $\mathbb{C}^\ell \to \mathbb{C}^\ell$ where $\ell$ is the number of distinct critical points. The more complicated determinant identity that we establish is closely connected to the multinomial identity known as Dyson's conjecture.