Sylvester’s double sums: The general case

In 1853 Sylvester introduced a family of double-sum expressions for two finite sets of indeterminates and showed that some members of the family are essentially the polynomial subresultants of the monic polynomials associated with these sets. A question naturally arises: What are the other members of the family? This paper provides a complete answer to this question. The technique that we developed to answer the question turns out to be general enough to characterize all members of the family, providing a uniform method.