On Zeros of a Polynomial in a Finite Grid

A 1993 result of Alon and Furedi gives a sharp upper bound on the number of zeros of a multivariate polynomial over an integral domain in a finite grid, in terms of the degree of the polynomial. This result was recently generalized to polynomials over an arbitrary commutative ring, assuming a certain "Condition (D)" on the grid which holds vacuously when the ring is a domain. In the first half of this paper we give a further Generalized Alon-Furedi Theorem which provides a sharp upper bound when the degrees of the polynomial in each variable are also taken into account. This yields in particular a new proof of Alon-Furedi. We then discuss the relationship between Alon-Furedi and results of DeMillo-Lipton, Schwartz and Zippel. A direct coding theoretic interpretation of Alon-Furedi Theorem and its generalization in terms of Reed--Muller type affine variety codes is shown which gives us the minimum Hamming distance of these codes. Then we apply the Alon-Furedi Theorem to quickly recover (and sometimes strengthen) old and new results in finite geometry, including the Jamison/Brouwer-Schrijver bound on affine blocking sets. We end with a discussion of multiplicity enhancements.