2026/07/26 by Thien Le, Melanie Weber
#math.CO
We prove a conjecture of Monical, Tokcan, and Yong that every fixed positive power of the Vandermonde determinant is non-SNP in all sufficiently many variables, where a polynomial is non-SNP if there is a lattice point in its Newton polytope that does not appear with nonzero coefficient. This means our result proves that for every even power k≥4, there is always such a missing lattice monomial in large enough dimensions. The odd case follows from alternation, and the quadratic case was previously known. For every even power k≥4, we exhibit an explicit lattice point in the Newton polytope of aδkk whose coefficient vanishes. The vanishing is obtained from a Dyson constant-term identity, proved using the finite-variable Jack scalar product and Macdonald's specialization formula. The key even-power construction and proof strategy arose from prompting with OpenAI Codex (GPT Sol 5.6 Extra High), a large language model; the complete transcript appears in the appendix. The authors subsequently checked and organized the argument. The accompanying Lean formalization is available at https://github.com/steven-le-thien/vandermonde-snp.