Schur Polynomials Do Not Have Small Formulas If the Determinant Doesn’t Prasad Chaugule Department of Computer Science & Engineering, IIT Bombay, India
[email protected] Mrinal Kumar Department of Computer Science & Engineering, IIT Bombay, India
[email protected] Nutan Limaye Department of Computer Science & Engineering, IIT Bombay, India
[email protected] Chandra Kanta Mohapatra Department of Computer Science & Engineering, IIT Bombay, India
[email protected] Adrian She Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada
[email protected] Srikanth Srinivasan Department of Mathematics, IIT Bombay, India
[email protected] Abstract Schur Polynomials are families of symmetric polynomials that have been classically studied in Combinatorics and Algebra alike. They play a central role in the study of Symmetric functions, in Representation theory [39], in Schubert calculus [26] as well as in Enumerative combinatorics [14, 38, 39]. In recent years, they have also shown up in various incarnations in Computer Science, e.g, Quantum computation [17, 31] and Geometric complexity theory [21]. However, unlike some other families of symmetric polynomials like the Elementary Symmet- ric polynomials, the Power Symmetric polynomials and the Complete Homogeneous Symmetric polynomials, the computational complexity of syntactically computing Schur polynomials has not been studied much. In particular, it is not known whether Schur polynomials can be computed efficiently by algebraic formulas. In this work, we address this question, and show that unless every polynomial with a small algebraic branching program (ABP) has a small algebraic formula, there are Schur polynomials that cannot be computed by algebraic formula of polynomial size.