  Invariance with respect to linear or affine transformations of the domain is
arguably the most common symmetry exhibited by natural algebraic properties. In
this work, we show that any low complexity affine-invariant property of
multivariate functions over finite fields is testable with a constant number of
queries. This immediately reproves, for instance, that the Reed-Muller code
over F_p of degree d < p is testable, with an argument that uses no detailed
algebraic information about polynomials except that low degree is preserved by
composition with affine maps.
  The complexity of an affine-invariant property P refers to the maximum
complexity, as defined by Green and Tao (Ann. Math. 2008), of the sets of
linear forms used to characterize P. A more precise statement of our main
result is that for any fixed prime p >=2 and fixed integer R >= 2, any
affine-invariant property P of functions f: F_p^n -> [R] is testable, assuming
the complexity of the property is less than p. Our proof involves developing
analogs of graph-theoretic techniques in an algebraic setting, using tools from
higher-order Fourier analysis.
