On Amitsur’s complex

and Fk* the group of units of Fk. Define ring homomorphisms ei (i = 1, , k+ 1) of Fk to Fk+l by(2'3) ei(fl? * ?fk) =fl? * fi?1 fi ... ?fk and define a multiplicative homomorphism Ak: Fk* -> F(k+l)* by Ak(X) = el(x) (E2(X)) * ... (ek+l(x))+1. Then the groups Fk* and mappings Ak form the Amitsur complex; the kth homology group Ker Ak+l/Im Ak we denote by Hk(F). In case F is a finite dimensional extension field, Amitsur showed that H2(F) is isomorphic to the Brauer group of central simple C-algebras split by F. He also showed that in case F is a normal separable extension, Hn(F) is isomorphic to Hn(G, F*) the nth cohomology group of the Galois group G of F over C with coefficients in the group of nonzero elements of F. In this paper, we extend and simplify Amitsur's results. We begin by showing (?2) that in case F is a separable field extension of C, Hn(F) --'Hn([G: H], K*), where K is a normal closure of F with Galois group G, H is the subgroup corresponding to F, and the cohomology group on the right side is the relative cohomology group as introduced in [I]. Next, we study Hn(F) when C is not necessarily a field but when n = 2. In ?3, under weak hypotheses on F, we exhibit a homomorphism of H2(F) to the (generalized) Brauer group of central separable algebra classes split by F [5]. This homomorphism is an isomorphism under stronger hypotheses on F and C. These hypotheses are slightly weaker than assuming all projective C, F, and F2 modules are free and include the cases (10) C is semilocal (not necessarily Noetherian) and F is a C-algebra which is a-finitely generated projective C-module containing C 1 as a direct summand and (20) C=K[x], F=L[x], with K a field and L a finite dimensional commutative K-algebra. Hochschild in [13] has given a description of the Brauer group in case F is a purely inseparable extension field of C of exponent 1. In [3, ?7], Amitsur