The Hopf condition for bilinear forms over arbitrary fields

Abstract

We settle an old question about the existence of certain "sums-of-squares" formulas over a field F (which are the simplest examples of composition formulas for quadratic forms). A classical theorem says that if such a formula exists over a field of characteristic 0, then certain binomial coefficients must be even. We use motivic cohomology to prove that the same result holds in characteristic p.