Download or read book Geometric Methods in the Algebraic Theory of Quadratic Forms written by Oleg T. Izhboldin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-02-07 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The geometric approach to the algebraic theory of quadratic forms is the study of projective quadrics over arbitrary fields. Function fields of quadrics have been central to the proofs of fundamental results since the 1960's. Recently, more refined geometric tools have been brought to bear on this topic, such as Chow groups and motives, and have produced remarkable advances on a number of outstanding problems. Several aspects of these new methods are addressed in this volume, which includes an introduction to motives of quadrics by A. Vishik, with various applications, notably to the splitting patterns of quadratic forms, papers by O. Izhboldin and N. Karpenko on Chow groups of quadrics and their stable birational equivalence, with application to the construction of fields with u-invariant 9, and a contribution in French by B. Kahn which lays out a general framework for the computation of the unramified cohomology groups of quadrics and other cellular varieties.