Composition collisions and projective polynomials

Abstract

The functional decomposition of polynomials has been a topic of great interest and importance in pure and computer algebra and their applications. The structure of compositions of (suitably normalized) polynomials f=g(h) over finite fields is well understood in many cases, but quite poorly when the degrees of both components are divisible by the characteristic p. This work investigates the decomposition of polynomials whose degree is a power of p.