On the stufe of quartic fields (Q2277014)

The level s(K) of a field K is defined as a minimum n (if it exists) such that \(-1=a^ 2_ 1+...+a^ 2_ n\), for certain \(a_ 1,...,a_ n\) in K. It is known that s(K)\(\leq 4\) for every nonreal number field K. However, the known proofs of this result are not elementary since they use the Hasse-Minkowski theorem. The aim of this paper is to present an elementary proof of this result for quartic fields. So far such elementary proofs were found for quadratic fields [\textit{A. R. Rajwade}, Indian J. Pure Appl. Math. 6, 725- 726 (1975; Zbl 0363.12003)] and for cyclotomic fields [\textit{P. Chowla} and \textit{S. Chowla}, J. Number Theory 2, 271-272 (1970; Zbl 0198.074)].