Computing the Top Betti Numbers of Semialgebraic Sets Defined by Quadratic Inequalities in Polynomial Time

For any ℓ>0, we present an algorithm which takes as input a semi-algebraic set, S, defined by P ₁≤0,…,P _s ≤0, where each P _i ∈RX ₁,…,X _k ] has degree≤2, and computes the top ℓ Betti numbers of S, b _k−1(S),…,b _k−ℓ (S), in polynomial time. The complexity of the algorithm, stated more precisely, is . For fixed ℓ, the complexity of the algorithm can be expressed as , which is polynomial in the input parameters s and k. To our knowledge this is the first polynomial time algorithm for computing nontrivial topological invariants of semialgebraic sets in R ^k defined by polynomial inequalities, where the number of inequalities is not fixed and the polynomials are allowed to have degree greater than one. For fixed s, we obtain, by letting ℓ=k, an algorithm for computing all the Betti numbers of S whose complexity is . An erratum to this article can be found at