Computing Gröbner Bases for Vanishing Ideals of Finite Sets of Points

We present an algorithm to compute a Gröbner basis for the vanishing ideal of a finite set of points in an affine space. For distinct points the algorithm is a generalization of univariate Newton interpolation. Computational evidence suggests that our method compares favorably with previous algorithms when the number of variables is small relative to the number of points. We also present a preprocessing technique that significantly enhances the performance of all the algorithms considered. For points with multiplicities, we adapt our algorithm to compute the vanishing ideal via Taylor expansions.