On the complexity of Putinar's Positivstellensatz

Let S = {x ∈ R | g1(x) ≥ 0, . . . , gm(x) ≥ 0} be a basic closed semialgebraic set defined by real polynomials gi. Putinar’s Positivstellensatz says that, under a certain condition stronger than compactness of S, every real polynomial f positive on S posesses a representation f = P m i=0 σigi where g0 := 1 and each σi is a sum of squares of polynomials. Such a representation is a certificate for the nonnegativity of f on S. We give a bound on the degrees of the terms σigi in this representation which depends on the description of S, the degree of f and a measure of how close f is to having a zero on S. As a consequence, we get information about the convergence rate of Lasserre’s procedure for optimization of a polynomial subject to polynomial constraints.