Resultants over commutative idempotent semirings I: Algebraic aspect

The resultant theory plays a crucial role in computational algebra and algebraic geometry. The theory has two aspects: algebraic and geometric. In this paper, we focus on the algebraic aspect. One of the most important and well known algebraic properties of the resultant is that it is equal to the determinant of the Sylvester matrix. In 2008, Odagiri proved that a similar property holds over the tropical semiring if one replaces subtraction with addition. The tropical semiring belongs to a large family of algebraic structures called commutative idempotent semiring. In this paper, we prove that the same property (with subtraction replaced with addition) holds over an arbitrary commutative idempotent semiring.