Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
This paper addresses a number of questions concerning the size of factors of polynomials. Let p be a monic algebraic polynomial of degree n and suppose q1q2 … qi is a monic factor of p of degree m. Then we can, in many cases, exactly determine
Here ‖ . ‖ is the supremum norm either on [—1, 1] or on {|z| ≤ 1}. We do this by showing that, in the interval case, for each m and n, the n-th Chebyshev polynomial is extremal. This extends work of Gel'fond, Mahler, Granville, Boyd and others. A number of variants of this problem are also considered.