Cahit Arf and his invariant (Q2906913)

The first part of this article is a revised version of the authors' articles [Math. Semesterber. 57, No. 1, 73--102 (2010; Zbl 1201.01015); ibid. 58, No. 2, 125--136 (2011; Zbl 1244.11032)] on the Arf invariant. In an appendix the authors show that an error in \textit{C. Arf}\,'s Theorem 11 in [J. Reine Angew. Math. 183, 148--167 (1941; Zbl 0025.01403; JFM 67.0055.02)] may be corrected by invoking \textit{R. Baeza}'s theorem [Bol. Soc. Bras. Mat. 13, No. 1, 105--114 (1982; Zbl 0573.10014)], for which they give a simple proof using only tools and methods known to Arf. They also prove \textit{P. Draxl}\,'s lemma [Nachr. Akad. Wiss. Göttingen, II. Math.-Phys. Kl. 1975, 251--259 (1975; Zbl 0316.16018)] on common splitting fields of quaternion algebras.