Pfister's Local--Global Principle and Systems of Quadratic Forms
Number Theory
2020-07-06 v1 Algebraic Geometry
Abstract
Let be a unimodular quadratic form over a field . Pfister's famous local--global principle asserts that represents a torsion class in the Witt group of if and only if it has signature , and that in this case, the order of Witt class of is a power of . We give two analogues of this result to systems of quadratic forms, the second of which applying only to nonsingular pairs. We also prove a counterpart of Pfister's theorem for finite-dimensional -algebras with involution, generalizing a result of Lewis and Unger.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1909.07135,
title = {Pfister's Local--Global Principle and Systems of Quadratic Forms},
author = {Uriya A. First},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.07135},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
16 pages; comments are welcome