Timeline for What is a reference for the Hasse-Minkowski classification of indefinite forms?
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8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Mar 6, 2010 at 14:04 | comment | added | Pete L. Clark | "Cited" as in they give a reference to paper of Hasse and/or Minkowski? Or just called the "Hasse-Minkowski classification"? I suspect the latter, and then I couldn't tell you why they say that. It is certainly true that you use H-M to prove this result, and that the proof is simpler than the derivation of H-M itself, so in some sense it's a consequence. I'm just saying that a quadratic form theorist -- rather than a geometric topologist -- would probably not say it this way, which explains your search engine difficulties. | |
| Mar 6, 2010 at 7:36 | comment | added | Simon Rose | If that's the case, then why is it cited as the Hasse Minkowski classification in Donaldson-Kronheimer? | |
| Mar 6, 2010 at 3:06 | comment | added | Pete L. Clark | Perhaps part of the problem is that the classification result you want -- for indefinite unimodular quadratic forms over $\mathbb{Z}$ -- is not part of the Hasse-Minkowski theory, which considers quadratic forms over $\mathbb{Q}$ and its completions. I think the result in question is simply more recent (certainly than Minkowski), but I don't have a reference on hand to back this up. | |
| Mar 6, 2010 at 1:27 | answer | added | Will Jagy | timeline score: 2 | |
| Mar 5, 2010 at 22:29 | vote | accept | Simon Rose | ||
| Mar 5, 2010 at 22:03 | comment | added | Tim Perutz | Google is good, but sometimes you have to actually read the book. Don-Kron cite two references in the bibliographic notes at the end of ch. 1: Serre's "Course in Arithmetic" and Milnor-Husemoller's "Symm. Bilinear Forms", as in Allan Edmonds's answer. Serre's book is on my shelf and contains a complete proof; probably M-H does too. | |
| Mar 5, 2010 at 21:39 | answer | added | Allan Edmonds | timeline score: 5 | |
| Mar 5, 2010 at 21:26 | history | asked | Simon Rose | CC BY-SA 2.5 |