Vincent Astier and Thomas Unger: Signatures of hermitian forms

thomas dot unger at ucd dot ie

Submission: 2010, Mar 4

Signatures of quadratic forms have been generalized to hermitian forms over algebras with involution. In the literature this is done via Morita theory, which causes sign ambiguities in certain cases. The main result of this paper consists of a method for resolving this problem, using properties of the underlying algebra with involution.

2000 Mathematics Subject Classification: 16K20, 11E39, 13J30

Keywords and Phrases: Central simple algebras, involutions, quadratic and hermitian forms, signatures, hermitian squares, torsion, Witt groups

Full text: dvi.gz 52 k, dvi 137 k, ps.gz 340 k, pdf.gz 173 k, pdf 194 k.


Server Home Page