Suppose we are given an
-tuple of (not necessarily distinct) complex numbers
and we construct a monic univariate polynomial of degree
over field
whose
roots are the elements of 
,
where
is the coefficient of monomial
of degree
in polynomial
of degree
. This double-indexing might seem a bit confusing, but its usefulness will be made evident later on.
Usually, we take a univariate polynomial and try to find its roots. Now we are interested in the reverse operation, i.e., we would like to find the values of the coefficients
of polynomial
in terms of the roots
. Note that every permutation of the
-tuple
results in the same monic polynomial of degree
.
_____
Constructing polynomials
Say we know the coefficients of polynomial
of degree
. Then we can write the coefficients
of polynomial
in terms of the coefficients
and the
-th element of
-tuple
. On my previous post on this topic, I derived the recursion

Let us start with a monic polynomial of degree zero,
, whose only coefficient is
. We take the first element of the
-tuple
and construct the monic polynomial
of degree
using the recursion above. Then we take the 2nd root
and construct the monic polynomial of degree
whose roots are 
.
Iterating successively, we obtain a monic polynomial
of degree
whose roots are
.
_____
A graphical approach
Consider the following set of 15 nodes arranged in 5 columns and 5 rows. Each node is labelled with an ordered pair
, where
is the row index and
is the column index.

We now attach a complex number
to each node
. The coefficient of monomial
in polynomial
can be thought of as the number attached to node
. For example, the coefficients of polynomial
are the numbers attached to the nodes of the 3rd column (note that we count rows and columns starting at the zero index, like in the C programming language). The double-indexing now makes some sense ;-)
Finally, we add directed edges linking nodes in adjacent columns, and obtain the following directed graph (which reminds me of the trellis diagrams used in convolutional coding)

Recall the recursion formula which allows us to write the coefficients of polynomial
in terms of the coefficients of polynomial 
.
Since the coefficients
are attached to the nodes of the directed graph depicted above, we can use the recursion formula to compute the values attached to the nodes of a given column as a function of the values attached to the nodes in the column to the left.
This graphical approach is (most likely) of no practical use. Nonetheless, this approach does reveal the “structure” of the process of constructing a polynomial from its roots, and such structure is of much greater beauty than cumbersome algebraic manipulation.
_____
An example
Suppose we want to compute the coefficients of the monic polynomial
, which has a root of multiplicity
at
. In this case we have
. From the well-known binomial theorem, we know that
,
and therefore, the coefficients are
,
,
,
, and
. Note that the absolute values of these coefficients are the binomial coefficients and can be found in the 5th row of Pascal’s triangle.
Let us now construct this polynomial one step at a time using the graphical approach described above. We start with monic polynomial
, whose only coefficient is 
and then we compute the coefficients of the monic polynomial
using the recursion formula. Graphically, this means that the values of the 2 nodes in the 2nd column can be computed from
, as follows

where the directed edges now have weights. For example, the edge linking nodes
and
has weight
, while the edge linking
and
has weight
. If the weight of an edge is equal to
, then we do not label the edge in order to avoid cluttering the diagram.
From the coefficients of
and the second root,
, we can compute the coefficients of
using the recursion again, i.e., the values of the nodes in the 3rd column can be computed from the values in the nodes in the 2nd column, as follows

The values of the nodes in the 3rd column are known, and since the 3rd root is
we can now obtain the coefficients of 

and since
, we can finally obtain the coefficients of the monic polynomial
, which are the values of the nodes in the 5th column

In this example the roots I chose have zero imaginary parts, but this approach still works if the roots have nonzero imaginary parts. This method could be used to compute the coefficients of polynomials of degrees larger than
, of course.