Succinct and representational Witt rings

Jerrold Lewis Kleinstein and Alex I. Rosenberg

Vol. 86 (1980), No. 1, 99–137

DOI: 10.2140/pjm.1980.86.99

Abstract

Three special classes of abstract Witt rings are studied. The classical description of the annihilator of a round form is generalized as is the description of the torsion subgroup of the Witt ring of a field. We translate some results of a previous paper into this abstract setting and also study Pfister forms there. We show how our special classes of abstract Witt rings relate to the Witt ring of classes of nondegenerate symmetric bilinear forms over a semilocal ring.

Mathematical Subject Classification

Primary: 10C05, 10C05

Secondary: 16A48

Milestones

Received: 21 March 1978

Published: 1 January 1980