Important: The polytools package has been deprecated. Use the superseding command PolynomialTools[Shorten] instead.

This function applies transformations on f in an effort to make f smaller, more precisely, to make its length smaller. The following transformations are tried: adding or multiplying x by a constant, replacing x by its reciprocal, and combinations of these transformations.

When a field extension is given by an irreducible polynomial f this procedure can be used to search for a simpler polynomial representing the same field extension.

If f contains only one variable then the second argument x is optional.