Using monodromy to recover symmetries of polynomial systems

Timothy Duff, Viktor Korotynskiy, Tomás Pajdla, Margaret H. Regan

Abstract: Galois/monodromy groups attached to parametric systems of polynomial equations provide a method for detecting the existence of symmetries in solution sets. Beyond the question of existence, one would like to compute formulas for these symmetries, towards the eventual goal of solving the systems more efficiently. We describe and implement one possible approach to this task using numerical homotopy continuation and multivariate rational function interpolation. We illustrate our methods on several examples, including two cases with nonlinear symmetries which appear in applications from computer vision and robotics.