English

Pfister's Local--Global Principle and Systems of Quadratic Forms

Number Theory 2020-07-06 v1 Algebraic Geometry

Abstract

Let qq be a unimodular quadratic form over a field KK. Pfister's famous local--global principle asserts that qq represents a torsion class in the Witt group of KK if and only if it has signature 00, and that in this case, the order of Witt class of qq is a power of 22. 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 KK-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