Author: Tsit-Yuen Lam
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
ISBN: 9780805356663
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Author: W. Scharlau
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642699715
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
For a long time - at least from Fermat to Minkowski - the theory of quadratic forms was a part of number theory. Much of the best work of the great number theorists of the eighteenth and nineteenth century was concerned with problems about quadratic forms. On the basis of their work, Minkowski, Siegel, Hasse, Eichler and many others crea ted the impressive "arithmetic" theory of quadratic forms, which has been the object of the well-known books by Bachmann (1898/1923), Eichler (1952), and O'Meara (1963). Parallel to this development the ideas of abstract algebra and abstract linear algebra introduced by Dedekind, Frobenius, E. Noether and Artin led to today's structural mathematics with its emphasis on classification problems and general structure theorems. On the basis of both - the number theory of quadratic forms and the ideas of modern algebra - Witt opened, in 1937, a new chapter in the theory of quadratic forms. His most fruitful idea was to consider not single "individual" quadratic forms but rather the entity of all forms over a fixed ground field and to construct from this an algebra ic object. This object - the Witt ring - then became the principal object of the entire theory. Thirty years later Pfister demonstrated the significance of this approach by his celebrated structure theorems.

Author: Onorato Timothy O’Meara
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 366241922X
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Author: John Horton Conway
Publisher: American Mathematical Soc.
ISBN: 1470448424
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
John Horton Conway's unique approach to quadratic forms was the subject of the Hedrick Lectures that he gave in August of 1991 at the Joint Meetings of the Mathematical Association of America and the American Mathematical Society in Orono, Maine. This book presents the substance of those lectures. The book should not be thought of as a serious textbook on the theory of quadratic forms. It consists rather of a number of essays on particular aspects of quadratic forms that have interested the author. The lectures are self-contained and will be accessible to the generally informed reader who has no particular background in quadratic form theory. The minor exceptions should not interrupt the flow of ideas. The afterthoughts to the lectures contain discussion of related matters that occasionally presuppose greater knowledge.

Author: Larry J. Gerstein
Publisher: American Mathematical Soc.
ISBN: 0821844652
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
The arithmetic theory of quadratic forms is a rich branch of number theory that has had important applications to several areas of pure mathematics--particularly group theory and topology--as well as to cryptography and coding theory. This book is a self-contained introduction to quadratic forms that is based on graduate courses the author has taught many times. It leads the reader from foundation material up to topics of current research interest--with special attention to the theory over the integers and over polynomial rings in one variable over a field--and requires only a basic background in linear and abstract algebra as a prerequisite. Whenever possible, concrete constructions are chosen over more abstract arguments. The book includes many exercises and explicit examples, and it is appropriate as a textbook for graduate courses or for independent study. To facilitate further study, a guide to the extensive literature on quadratic forms is provided.

Author: Johannes Buchmann
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3540463682
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
The book deals with algorithmic problems related to binary quadratic forms. It uniquely focuses on the algorithmic aspects of the theory. The book introduces the reader to important areas of number theory such as diophantine equations, reduction theory of quadratic forms, geometry of numbers and algebraic number theory. The book explains applications to cryptography and requires only basic mathematical knowledge. The author is a world leader in number theory.

Author: Duncan A. Buell
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461245427
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The first coherent exposition of the theory of binary quadratic forms was given by Gauss in the Disqnisitiones Arithmeticae. During the nine teenth century, as the theory of ideals and the rudiments of algebraic number theory were developed, it became clear that this theory of bi nary quadratic forms, so elementary and computationally explicit, was indeed just a special case of a much more elega,nt and abstract theory which, unfortunately, is not computationally explicit. In recent years the original theory has been laid aside. Gauss's proofs, which involved brute force computations that can be done in what is essentially a two dimensional vector space, have been dropped in favor of n-dimensional arguments which prove the general theorems of algebraic number the ory. In consequence, this elegant, yet pleasantly simple, theory has been neglected even as some of its results have become extremely useful in certain computations. I find this neglect unfortunate, because binary quadratic forms have two distinct attractions. First, the subject involves explicit computa tion and many of the computer programs can be quite simple. The use of computers in experimenting with examples is both meaningful and enjoyable; one can actually discover interesting results by com puting examples, noticing patterns in the "data," and then proving that the patterns result from the conclusion of some provable theorem.

Author: Max-Albert Knus
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642754015
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description
From its birth (in Babylon?) till 1936 the theory of quadratic forms dealt almost exclusively with forms over the real field, the complex field or the ring of integers. Only as late as 1937 were the foundations of a theory over an arbitrary field laid. This was in a famous paper by Ernst Witt. Still too early, apparently, because it took another 25 years for the ideas of Witt to be pursued, notably by Albrecht Pfister, and expanded into a full branch of algebra. Around 1960 the development of algebraic topology and algebraic K-theory led to the study of quadratic forms over commutative rings and hermitian forms over rings with involutions. Not surprisingly, in this more general setting, algebraic K-theory plays the role that linear algebra plays in the case of fields. This book exposes the theory of quadratic and hermitian forms over rings in a very general setting. It avoids, as far as possible, any restriction on the characteristic and takes full advantage of the functorial aspects of the theory. The advantage of doing so is not only aesthetical: on the one hand, some classical proofs gain in simplicity and transparency, the most notable examples being the results on low-dimensional spinor groups; on the other hand new results are obtained, which went unnoticed even for fields, as in the case of involutions on 16-dimensional central simple algebras. The first chapter gives an introduction to the basic definitions and properties of hermitian forms which are used throughout the book.

Author: Eva Bayer-Fluckiger
Publisher: American Mathematical Soc.
ISBN: 0821827790
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
This volume outlines the proceedings of the conference on "Quadratic Forms and Their Applications" held at University College Dublin. It includes survey articles and research papers ranging from applications in topology and geometry to the algebraic theory of quadratic forms and its history. Various aspects of the use of quadratic forms in algebra, analysis, topology, geometry, and number theory are addressed. Special features include the first published proof of the Conway-Schneeberger Fifteen Theorem on integer-valued quadratic forms and the first English-language biography of Ernst Witt, founder of the theory of quadratic forms.

Author: Herbert Gross
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1475714548
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
For about a decade I have made an effort to study quadratic forms in infinite dimensional vector spaces over arbitrary division rings. Here we present in a systematic fashion half of the results found du ring this period, to wit, the results on denumerably infinite spaces (" ~O- forms") . Certain among the resul ts included here had of course been published at the time when they were found, others appear for the first time (the case, for example, in Chapters IX, X, XII where I in clude results contained in the Ph.D.theses by my students w. Allenspach, L. Brand, U. Schneider, M. Studer). If one wants to give an introduction to the geometric algebra of infinite dimensional quadratic spaces, a discussion of ~ -dimensional 0 spaces ideally serves the purpose. First, these spaces show a large nurober of phenomena typical of infinite dimensional spaces. Second, most proofs can be done by recursion which resembles the familiar pro cedure by induction in the finite dimensional Situation. Third, the student acquires a good feeling for the linear algebra in infinite di mensions because it is impossible to camouflage problems by topological expedients (in dimension ~O it is easy to see, in a given case, wheth er topological language is appropriate or not) .