Solving sums of squares in global fields

Abstract

The problem of writing a totally positive element as a sum of squares has a long history in mathematics, going back to Bachet and Lagrange. While for some specific rings (like integers or polynomials over the rationals), there are known methods for decomposing an element into a sum of squares, in general, for many other important rings and fields, the problem is still widely open. In this paper, we present an explicit algorithm for decomposing an element of an arbitrary global field (either a number field or a global function field) into a sum of squares of minimal length.