A tighter bound on the number of relevant variables in a bounded degree Boolean function

Abstract: A classical theorem of Nisan and Szegedy says that a boolean function with degree $d$ as a real polynomial depends on at most $d2^{d-1}$ of its variables. In recent work by Chiarelli, Hatami and Saks, this upper bound was improved to $C \cdot 2^d$, where $C = 6.614$. Here we refine their argument to show that one may take $C = 4.416$.