  We prove that any pair of bivariate trinomials has at most 5 isolated roots
in the positive quadrant. The best previous upper bounds independent of the
polynomial degrees were much larger, e.g., 248832 (for just the non-degenerate
roots) via a famous general result of Khovanski. Our bound is sharp, allows
real exponents, allows degeneracies, and extends to certain systems of
n-variate fewnomials, giving improvements over earlier bounds by a factor
exponential in the number of monomials. We also derive analogous sharpened
bounds on the number of connected components of the real zero set of a single
n-variate m-nomial.
