ABSTRACT
The Witt ring of a field of characteristic ≠ 2 was introduced by E. Witt in his famous 1937 paper [89] on quadratic forms over fields. We present here a slightly more general version of Witt’s theory including fields of characteristic 2. The techniques of Witt’s paper are not sufficient for the inclusion of fields of characteristic 2. The approach used here is an adaptation of a more general construction of the Witt ring of a commutative ring due to M. Knebusch. Here we follow the presentation of J. Milnor and D. Husemoller [69].
