Singular lines of trilinear forms (Q977488)

The alternating bilinear forms on an \(n\)-dimensional vector space \(V\) are well studied in terms of their ranks and orbits. But trilinear and higher alternating multilinear forms on \(V\) are not well studied. The paper under review settles a question about the geometry of trilinear forms in arbitrary dimension; this was conjectured in a previous work of the second author. Following is the main result of this paper: Let \(K\) be a quasi-algebraically closed field, that is, every non-constant homogeneous multivariate polynomial of degree less than the number of its variables has a non-zero \(k\)-valued root. Let \(e \geq 3\) be an integer, and \(V\) be a vector space over \(K\) of dimension at least \(e + 1\). Then every alternating \(e\)-form on \(V\) has a singular \((e - 1)\)-dimensional space. As a consequence the result is true in particular for finite fields, as it is known due to results by Chevalley and Warning that these fields are quasi- algebraically closed. By studying with an example of a real Euclidean space of dimension 7, the authors have observed that the condition ``quasi-algebraically closed field'' is necessary. They have also studied some auxiliary results for two-singular subspaces for a trilinear form on a vector space \(V\).