Depth-3 arithmetic formulae over fields of characteristic zero

In this paper we prove near quadratic lower bounds for depth-3 arithmetic formulae over fields of characteristic zero. Such bounds are obtained for the elementary symmetric functions, the (trace of) iterated matrix multiplication, and the determinant. As corollaries we get the first non-trivial lower bounds for computing polynomials of constant degree, and a gap between the power depth-3 arithmetic formulas and depth-4 arithmetic formulas. The main technical contribution relates the complexity of computing a polynomial in this model to the wealth of partial derivatives it has on every affine subspace of small co-dimension. Lower bounds for related models utilize an algebraic analog of Nechiporuk lower bound on Boolean formulae.