A SINGLY EXPONENTIAL STRATIFICATION SCHEME FOR REAL SEMIALGEBRAIC VARIETIES AND ITS APPLICATIONS

This paper describes an effective procedure for stratifying a real semi-algebraic set into cells of constant description size. The attractive feature of our method is that the number of cells produced is singly exponential in the number of input variables. This compares favorably with the doubly exponential size of Collins' decomposition. Unlike Collins' construction, however, our scheme does not produce a cell complex but only a smooth stratification. Nevertheless, we are able to apply our results in interesting ways to problems of point location and geometric optimization.