Generic Methods and Pfister Forms

In this work I try to provide a self-contained presentation on the concepts of algebraic theory of quadratic forms and on the graded rings that have emerged in the development of this theory. I started trying to clarify the meaning of "equivalence"between the various meanings of the concept of quadratic form. After the presentation of geometrical ingredients and results, we make an extract of the theory of Witt rings, a concept that originated the modern algebraic theory of quadratic forms. It is provided the key elements for the formulation of cohomology theories, focusing on the development of profinite cohomology theory and, especially, on galoisian cohomology. Are described the functors K 0 , K 1 and K 2 of classical K-theory and also the Milnor K-theory, which is more appropriate to formulate questions about quadratic forms. The dissertation is finished with the presentation of some concepts of the Theory of Special Groups, a first-order encoding of algebraic theory of quadratic forms, and with an example its importance by providing an extract of proof by Dickmann-Miraglia of the Marshall's conjecture on signatures, which relies heavily on this theory.

Powers of the Fundamental Ideal in the Witt Ring

Some model-theoretic results in the algebraic theory of quadratic forms

Marshall's abstract theory of spaces of orderings is a powerful tool in the algebraic theory of quadratic forms. We develop an abstract theory for semiorderings, developing a notion of a space of semiorderings which is a prespace of orderings. It is shown how to construct all finitely generated spaces of semiorderings. The morphisms between such spaces are studied, generalising the extension of valuations for fields into this context. An important invariant for studying Witt rings is the covering number of a preordering. Covering numbers are defined for abstract preorderings and related to other invariants of the Witt ring.

Special groups are an axiomatization of the algebraic theory of quadratic forms over fields. It is known that any finite reduced special group is the special group of some field. We show that any special group that is the projective limit of a projective system of finite reduced special groups is also the special group of some field.

Introduction Classical theory of symmetric bilinear forms and quadratic forms: Bilinear forms Quadratic forms Forms over rational function fields Function fields of quadrics Bilinear and quadratic forms and algebraic extensions $u$-invariants Applications of the Milnor conjecture On the norm residue homomorphism of degree two Algebraic cycles: Homology and cohomology Chow groups Steenrod operations Category of Chow motives Quadratic forms and algebraic cycles: Cycles on powers of quadrics The Izhboldin dimension Application of Steenrod operations The variety of maximal totally isotropic subspaces Motives of quadrics Appendices Bibliography Notation Terminology.

We show that over any field$F$of characteristic 2 and 2-rank$n$, there exist$2^{n}$bilinear$n$-fold Pfister forms that have no slot in common. This answers a question of Becher [‘Triple linkage’,Ann.$K$-Theory, to appear] in the negative. We provide an analogous result also for quadratic Pfister forms.

Quadratic Forms and Graphs

There are close relations between Bernoulli numbers and quadratic fields or quadratic forms. In order to explain those, we give a survey of the ideal theory of quadratic fields and quadratic forms. Since Gauss , it is well known that there is a deep relation between the ideal theory of quadratic fields (i.e. quadratic extensions of the rational number field) and integral quadratic forms. This is obvious for specialists, but textbooks which explain this in detail are rare. In most textbooks, they treat the correspondence of ideals only in the case of maximal orders (the ring of all integers) for which the description is simple and easy. This is very disappointing. We cannot see the whole picture of the theory of quadratic forms by such a restricted treatment and sometimes it causes misunderstanding. We need the full description of this kind of relation when we explain later the relation between L-functions of prehomogeneous vector spaces and the Bernoulli numbers. So it would be a good chance to try to explain the full relation here.

We consider a class of singular, zero-range perturbations of the quantum Hamiltonian of a system consisting of a test particle and N harmonic oscillators (Rayleigh gas). Using the theory of quadratic forms we construct the self-adjoint and bounded from below perturbed Hamiltonian and we give representation formulas for the resolvent and the unitary group. The one-dimensional, two-dimensional and three-dimensional cases are discussed.

Historically the theory of quadratic forms has its origins in number-theoretic questions of the following type: Which integers can be written in the form x 2 + 2y 2 , which are sums of three squares, or more generally, which integers can be represented by an arbitrary quadratic form Σ a ij x i x j integral coefficients? This general question is exceptionally difficult and we are still quite far from a complete solution. It is natural and considerably simpler to first investigate these questions over the field of rational numbers, that is, to ask for rational instead of integral solutions to the equation Σ a ij x i x j = a. This leads to the problem of classification of quadratic forms over \( \mathbb{Q} \), which was first solved by Minkowski. His solution appears in this chapter basically unaltered, except for a few simplifications and the use of modern terminology. The Gaussian sums of Gauss and Dirich-let play a significant role in the more formal algebraic part of the theory.

This dissertation presents computational tools for quadratic forms over global function fields of characteristic different from 2. The majority of the algorithms we develop in this study rely on our ability to find all places dividing any coefficient of the given quadratic form. This problem is equivalent to the factorization of fractional ideals in the ring of polynomial functions of a global function field. As a result, we begin by presenting alternative approaches for factoring fractional ideals that do not rely on determining the maximum order of the global function field in question. We then propose techniques for tackling the following quadratic form theory computational problems: how to detect whether a quadratic form is isotropic or not, how to detect whether a quadratic form is hyperbolic or not, how to compute the anisotropic dimension (or equivalently the Witt index) of a quadratic form, how to construct an anisotropic part of a quadratic form, how to determine if two forms are Witt-similar or are Ono-similar or not. We further explore algorithms for computing some important field invariants that are linked to quadratic forms. Those are: the length of a sum of squares, the level of a field, the Pythagoras number of a field, as well as a Pythagoras element of a field.

Our purpose in this chapter is to introduce three algebras of importance in the theory of quadratic forms, the Clifford algebra, the quaternion algebra, and the Hasse algebra. The Clifford algebra will be developed from first principles and its main use for us will be in the definition of an invariant called the spinor norm. The quaternion algebra and the Hasse algebra play an important role in the arithmetic theory of quadratic forms. The definition of the Hasse algebra depends on some of the structure theory of central simple algebras, in particular it needs Wedderburn’s theorem and the theory of similarity of algebras that is normally used in defining the Brauer group. We have therefore included a proof of Wedderburn’s theorem and some of its consequences. Also included as a convenience to the reader is a brief discussion of the tensor product of finite dimensional vector spaces1.

As we saw in the last chapter, it is possible to obtain some non-trivial necessary conditions for the existence of orthogonal designs just by considering the equations that the coefficient matrices of an orthogonal design must satisfy. The ad-hoc procedures we give in the last chapter can, with difficulty, be pursued further. However, these procedures quickly become inadequate. To properly describe the solution to the “algebraic problem of orthogonal designs”, it is necessary to discuss the theory of quadratic and bilinear forms. Only then can the “algebraic problem” be put in proper perspective.

In this chapter, we discuss the general theory of quadratic forms and the notion of congruence and its invariants, as well as the applications of the theory to the analysis of special forms. We will focus primarily on quadratic forms induced by rational functions, most notably the Hankel and Bezout forms, because of their connection to system-theoretic problems such as stability and signature symmetric realizations. These forms use as their data different representations of rational functions, namely power series and coprime factorizations respectively. But we will discuss also the partial fraction representation in relation to the computation of the Cauchy index of a rational function and the proof of the Hermite–Hurwitz theorem and the continued fraction representation as a tool in the computation of signatures of Hankel matrices as well as in the problem of Hankel matrix inversion. Thus, different representations of rational functions, i.e., different encodings of the information carried by a rational function, provide efficient starting points for different methods. The results obtained for rational functions will be applied to root-location problems for polynomials in the next chapter.