A Mathematician Said Who Can Quote Me a Theorem that's True? For the ones that I Know Are Simply not So, When the Characteristic is Two! This pretty limerick ?rst came to my ears in May 1998 during a talk by T.Y. Lam 1 on ?eld invariants from the theory of quadratic forms. It is-poetic exaggeration allowed-a suitable motto for this monograph. What is it about? At the beginning of the seventies I drew up a specialization theoryofquadraticandsymmetricbilinear formsover ?elds[32].Let? : K? L?? be a place. Then one can assign a form? (?)toaform? over K in a meaningful way ? if? has "good reduction" with respect to? (see1.1). The basic idea is to simply apply the place? to the coe?cients of?, which must therefore be in the valuation ring of?. The specialization theory of that time was satisfactory as long as the ?eld L, and therefore also K, had characteristic 2. It served me in the ?rst place as the foundation for a theory of generic splitting of quadratic forms [33], [34]. After a very modest beginning, this theory is now in full bloom. It became important for the understanding of quadratic forms over ?elds, as can be seen from the book [26]of Izhboldin-Kahn-Karpenko-Vishik for instance. One should note that there exists a theoryof(partial)genericsplittingofcentralsimplealgebrasandreductivealgebraic groups, parallel to the theory of generic splitting of quadratic forms (see [29] and the literature cited there).

Dieses Buch will dem Leser eine Einfuhrung in wichtige Techniken und Methoden der heutigen reellen Algebra und Geometrie vermitteln. An Voraussetzungen werden dabei nur Grundkenntnisse der Algebra erwartet, so dass das Buch fur Studenten mittlerer Semester geeignet ist.Das erste Kapitel enthalt zunachst grundlegende Fakten uber angeordnete Koerper und ihre reellen Abschlusse und behandelt dann verschiedene Methoden zur Bestimmung der Anzahl reeller Nullstellen von Polynomen. Das zweite Kapitel befasst sich mit reellen Stellen und gipfelt in Artins Loesung des 17. Hilbertschen Problems. Kapitel III schliesslich ist dem noch jungen Begriff des reellen Spektrums und seinen Anwendungen gewidmet."Neben dem 1987 erschienenen "Geometrie algebrique reelle" von J. Bochnak-M. Coste- M. Roy stellt die vorliegende Monographie das erste Lehrbuch auf diesem Gebiet dar... Damit liegt eine sehr empfehlenswerte Einfuhrung...vor..." (H. Mitsch, Monatshefte fur Mathematik 3/111, 1991)

The present book is devoted to a study of relative Prüfer rings and Manis valuations, with an eye to application in real and p-adic geometry. If one wants to expand on the usual algebraic geometry over a non-algebraically closed base field, e.g. a real closed field or p-adically closed field, one typically meets lots of valuation domains. Usually they are not discrete and hence not noetherian. Thus, for a further develomemt of real algebraic and real analytic geometry in particular, and certainly also rigid analytic and p-adic geometry, new chapters of commutative algebra are needed, often of a non-noetherian nature. The present volume presents one such chapter.

The book is the second part of an intended three-volume treatise on semialgebraic topology over an arbitrary real closed field R. In the first volume (LNM 1173) the category LSA(R) or regular paracompact locally semialgebraic spaces over R was studied. The category WSA(R) of weakly semialgebraic spaces over R - the focus of this new volume - contains LSA(R) as a full subcategory. The book provides ample evidence that WSA(R) is "the" right cadre to understand homotopy and homology of semialgebraic sets, while LSA(R) seems to be more natural and beautiful from a geometric angle. The semialgebraic sets appear in LSA(R) and WSA(R) as the full subcategory SA(R) of affine semialgebraic spaces. The theory is new although it borrows from algebraic topology. A highlight is the proof that every generalized topological (co)homology theory has a counterpart in WSA(R) with in some sense "the same," or even better, properties as the topological theory. Thus we may speak of ordinary (=singular) homology groups, orthogonal, unitary or symplectic K-groups, and various sorts of cobordism groups of a semialgebraic set over R. If R is not archimedean then it seems difficult to develop a satisfactory theory of these groups within the category of semialgebraic sets over R: with weakly semialgebraic spaces this becomes easy. It remains for us to interpret the elements of these groups in geometric terms: this is done here for ordinary (co)homology.

Dieses Buch will dem Leser eine Einfuhrung in wichtige Techniken und Methoden der heutigen reellen Algebra und Geometrie vermitteln. An Voraussetzungen werden dabei nur Grundkenntnisse der Algebra erwartet, so dass das Buch fur Studenten mittlerer Semester geeignet ist.Das erste Kapitel enthalt zunachst grundlegende Fakten uber angeordnete Koerper und ihre reellen Abschlusse und behandelt dann verschiedene Methoden zur Bestimmung der Anzahl reeller Nullstellen von Polynomen. Das zweite Kapitel befasst sich mit reellen Stellen und gipfelt in Artins Loesung des 17. Hilbertschen Problems. Kapitel III schliesslich ist dem noch jungen Begriff des reellen Spektrums und seinen Anwendungen gewidmet."Neben dem 1987 erschienenen "Geometrie algebrique reelle" von J. Bochnak-M. Coste- M. Roy stellt die vorliegende Monographie das erste Lehrbuch auf diesem Gebiet dar... Damit liegt eine sehr empfehlenswerte Einfuhrung...vor..." (H. Mitsch, Monatshefte fur Mathematik 3/111, 1991)