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A classical example of the construction of a quadratic field is to take the unique quadratic field inside the cyclotomic field generated by a primitive th root of unity, with an odd prime number. The uniqueness is a consequence of Galois theory , there being a unique subgroup of index 2 {\displaystyle 2} in the Galois group over Q ...
Geometrically, the discriminant of a quadratic form in three variables is the equation of a quadratic projective curve. The discriminant is zero if and only if the curve is decomposed in lines (possibly over an algebraically closed extension of the field). A quadratic form in four variables is the equation of a projective surface.
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Repeated discriminants: the discriminant of a quadratic field uniquely identifies it, but this is not true, in general, for higher-degree number fields. For example, there are two non-isomorphic cubic fields of discriminant 3969. They are obtained by adjoining a root of the polynomial x 3 − 21x + 28 or x 3 − 21x − 35, respectively.
Its discriminant as quadratic form need not be +1 (in fact this happens only for the case K = Q). Define the inverse different or codifferent [ 3 ] [ 4 ] or Dedekind's complementary module [ 5 ] as the set I of x ∈ K such that tr( xy ) is an integer for all y in O K , then I is a fractional ideal of K containing O K .
Another instance of quadratic forms is Pell's equation =. Binary quadratic forms are closely related to ideals in quadratic fields. This allows the class number of a quadratic field to be calculated by counting the number of reduced binary quadratic forms of a given discriminant.
For quadratic equations with rational coefficients, if the discriminant is a square number, then the roots are rational—in other cases they may be quadratic irrationals. If the discriminant is zero, then there is exactly one real root − b 2 a , {\displaystyle -{\frac {b}{2a}},} sometimes called a repeated or double root or two equal roots.
The Cohen–Lenstra heuristics [6] are a set of more precise conjectures about the structure of class groups of quadratic fields. For real fields they predict that about 75.45% of the fields obtained by adjoining the square root of a prime will have class number 1, a result that agrees with computations. [7]