This book presents the theory of quadratic and hermitian forms over rings in a very general setting. It avoids, as far as possible, any restriction on the chara

For a long time - at least from Fermat to Minkowski - the theory of quadratic forms was a part of number theory. Much of the best work of the great number theor

Contains the proceedings of the 1983 Seminar on Quadratic and Hermitian Forms held at McMaster University, July 1983. Between 1945 and 1965, most of the work in

From its birth (in Babylon?) till 1936 the theory of quadratic forms dealt almost exclusively with forms over the real field, the complex field or the ring of i