Representations of decomposable forms

Results connecting binary quadratic forms and their associated quadratic fields are extended to irreducible decomposable forms and their associated fields. A rational linear substitution that carries such a form into a nonzero rational multiple of itself is shown to correspond with a linear map which admits a unique decomposition as multiplication by a nonzero element of the field followed by an automorphism of the field. This correspondence is one-to-one whenever the form is nondegenerate. 1. Introduction. In recent papers by Butts and Pall (3), Butts and Estes (2), and Taussky (4), the representations of a rational multiple cip of binary quadratic form y by another binary quadratic form are studied. In this paper we generalize these results to rational representations of powers of irreducible decomposable forms. We show (Corollary 3.1) that any irreducible decomposable form which does not properly represent zero (for decomposable forms this is equivalent to being nondegenerate) and whose degree is relatively prime to the number of its variables has only a finite number of rational automorphs. Another interesting result (Corollary 1.3) is that a norm preserving linear endomorphism of an alge- braic number field (considered as a linear space over the rationals) which leaves the identity fixed is an automorphism of the field. This result is well known for quadratic fields and (in modified form) quaternion algebras, and provides one of the cornerstones for the theory of compo- sition of binary and quaternary quadratic forms.