DefinitionDefinition: Literature-sourcedProof: Not applicableaudited 2026-08-26
How statement and proof provenance work
The first chip identifies the source of the statement or construction; the second identifies the source of its local proof or verification.
- Literature-sourced: the exact statement appears in a cited source; only wording and notation differ.
- AI-adapted: a semantically identical restatement of literature-sourced material, modulo indexing, notation, and boundary cases adopted by the library.
- AI-generated: a genuinely novel statement formulated by AI, with no source for the claim itself.
These labels describe origin, not correctness: citations and verification chips remain separate evidence.
The trace form of a finite extension
Definition
Let be a finite field extension. The trace form of is the function
where is the field trace (The norm and trace of a finite field extension).
Because multiplication in is commutative and the trace is -linear in its argument, the trace form is a symmetric bilinear form on the -vector space in the sense of Bilinear forms, and symmetric, skew-symmetric, and alternating bilinear forms. The later theorem on this page identifies exactly when it is nondegenerate.