On effective Witt decomposition and Cartan-Dieudonne theorem
Abstract
Let be a number field, and let be a symmetric bilinear form in variables over . Let be a subspace of . A classical theorem of Witt states that the bilinear space can be decomposed into an orthogonal sum of hyperbolic planes, singular, and anisotropic components. We prove the existence of such a decomposition of small height, where all bounds on height are explicit in terms of heights of and . We also prove a special version of Siegel's Lemma for a bilinear space, which provides a small-height orthogonal decomposition into one-dimensional subspaces. Finally, we prove an effective version of Cartan-Dieudonn{\'e} theorem. Namely, we show that every isometry of a regular bilinear space can be represented as a product of reflections of small heights with an explicit bound on heights in terms of heights of , , and .
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.math/0501282,
title = {On effective Witt decomposition and Cartan-Dieudonne theorem},
author = {Lenny Fukshansky},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:math/0501282},
year = {2011}
}
Comments
16 pages, revised and corrected version, to appear in Canadian Journal of Mathematics