Introduction to Quadratic Forms Over Fields

This new version of the author's prizewinning book, Algebraic Theory of Quadratic Forms (W. A. Benjamin, Inc., 1973), gives a modern and self-contained introduction to the theory of quadratic forms over fields of characteristic different from two.

This new version of the author's prizewinning book, "Algebraic Theory of Quadratic Forms" (W. A. Benjamin, Inc., 1973), gives a modern and self-contained introduction to the theory of quadratic forms over fields of characteristic different from two.

Timothy O'Meara was born on January 29, 1928. He was educated at the University of Cape Town and completed his doctoral work under Emil Artin at Princeton University in 1953. He has served on the faculties of the University of Otago, Princeton University and the University of Notre Dame. From 1978 to 1996 he was provost of the University of Notre Dame. In 1991 he was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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.

The geometric approach to the algebraic theory of quadratic forms is the study of projective quadrics over arbitrary fields. Function fields of quadrics have been central to the proofs of fundamental results since the 1960's. Recently, more refined geometric tools have been brought to bear on this topic, such as Chow groups and motives, and have produced remarkable advances on a number of outstanding problems. Several aspects of these new methods are addressed in this volume, which includes an introduction to motives of quadrics by A. Vishik, with various applications, notably to the splitting patterns of quadratic forms, papers by O. Izhboldin and N. Karpenko on Chow groups of quadrics and their stable birational equivalence, with application to the construction of fields with u-invariant 9, and a contribution in French by B. Kahn which lays out a general framework for the computation of the unramified cohomology groups of quadrics and other cellular varieties.

A master class to learn convex optimization for ML and its applications to different fields and areas of engineering

This first part of a two-volume set offers a modern account of the representation theory of finite dimensional associative algebras over an algebraically closed field. The authors present this topic from the perspective of linear representations of finite-oriented graphs (quivers) and homological algebra.