Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

It is known that non-negative homogeneous polynomials(forms) over $\mathbb{R}$ are same as sums of squares if it is bivariate, quadratic forms, or ternary quartic by Hilbert. Once we know a form is a sum of squares, next natural question would be how many forms are needed to represent it as sums of squares. We denote the minimal number of summands in the sums of squares by rank (of the sum of squares). Ranks of some class of forms are known. For example, any bivariate forms (allowing all monomials) can be written as sum of $2$ squares.(i.e. its rank is $2$) and every nonnegative ternary quartic can be written as a sum of $3$ squares.(i.e. its rank is $3$). Our question is that "if we do not allow some monomials in a bivariate form, how its rank will be?". In the talk, we will introduce this problem in algebraic geometry flavor and provide some notions and tools to deal with.