Matrices in Elimination Theory

The last decade has witnessed the rebirth of resultant methods as a powerful computational tool for variable elimination and polynomial system solving. In particular, the advent of sparse elimination theory and toric varieties has provided ways to exploit the structure of polynomials encountered in a number of scientic and engineering applications. On the other hand, the Bezoutian reveals itself as an important tool in many areas connected to elimination theory and has its own merits, leading to new developments in effective algebraic geometry. This survey unifies the existing work on resultants, with emphasis on constructing matrices that generalize the classic matrices named after Sylvester, Bézout and Macaulay. The properties of the different matrix formulations are presented, including some complexity issues, with emphasis on variable elimination theory. We compare toric resultant matrices to Macaulay's matrix and further conjecture the generalization of Macaulay's exact rational exp..