The story
Named after German mathematician Ernst Witt (1911–1991), who introduced the concept in 1937.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Witt group
Today it means: Given a field k of characteristic ≠ 2, the abelian group of equivalence classes of nondegenerate symmetric bilinear forms over k (where the equivalence relation is such that two forms are equivalent if each is obtainable from the other by adding a metabolic quadratic space), with the group operation corresponding to that of orthogonal direct sum of forms; Full definition →