Nullstellensatz Size-Degree Trade-offs from Reversible Pebbling

We establish an exactly tight relation between reversiblepebblings of graphs and Nullstellensatz refutations of pebbling formulas,showing that a graph G can be reversibly pebbled in time t and space s if and only if there is a Nullstellensatz refutation of the pebbling formulaover G in size t + 1 and degree s (independently of the field in whichthe Nullstellensatz refutation is made). We use this correspondenceto prove a number of strong size-degree trade-offs for Nullstellensatz,which to the best of our knowledge are the first such results for thisproof system.