This monograph is the first book-length treatment of valuation theory on finite-dimensional division algebras, a subject of active and substantial research over the last forty years. Its development was spurred in the last decades of the twentieth century by important advances such as Amitsur''s construction of non crossed products and Platonov''s solution of the Tannaka-Artin problem.

This study is particularly timely because it approaches the subject from the perspective of associated graded structures. This new approach has been developed by the authors in the last few years and has significantly clarified the theory. Various constructions of division algebras are obtained as applications of the theory, such as noncrossed products and indecomposable algebras. In addition, the use of valuation theory in reduced Whitehead group calculations (after Hazrat and Wadsworth) and in essential dimension computations (after Baek and Merkurjev) is showcased.

The intended audience consists of graduate students and research mathematicians.

The geometric approach to the algebraic theory of quadratic forms is the study of projective quadrics over arbitrary fields. Function fields of quadrics have been central to the proofs of fundamental results since the 1960''s. Recently, more refined geometric tools have been brought to bear on this topic, such as Chow groups and motives, and have produced remarkable advances on a number of outstanding problems. Several aspects of these new methods are addressed in this volume, which includes an introduction to motives of quadrics by A. Vishik, with various applications, notably to the splitting patterns of quadratic forms, papers by O. Izhboldin and N. Karpenko on Chow groups of quadrics and their stable birational equivalence, with application to the construction of fields with u-invariant 9, and a contribution in French by B. Kahn which lays out a general framework for the computation of the unramified cohomology groups of quadrics and other cellular varieties.

This monograph is the first book-length treatment of valuation theory on finite-dimensional division algebras, a subject of active and substantial research over the last forty years. Its development was spurred in the last decades of the twentieth century by important advances such as Amitsur''s construction of non crossed products and Platonov''s solution of the Tannaka-Artin problem.

This study is particularly timely because it approaches the subject from the perspective of associated graded structures. This new approach has been developed by the authors in the last few years and has significantly clarified the theory. Various constructions of division algebras are obtained as applications of the theory, such as noncrossed products and indecomposable algebras. In addition, the use of valuation theory in reduced Whitehead group calculations (after Hazrat and Wadsworth) and in essential dimension computations (after Baek and Merkurjev) is showcased.

The intended audience consists of graduate students and research mathematicians.

The geometric approach to the algebraic theory of quadratic forms is the study of projective quadrics over arbitrary fields. Function fields of quadrics have been central to the proofs of fundamental results since the 1960''s. Recently, more refined geometric tools have been brought to bear on this topic, such as Chow groups and motives, and have produced remarkable advances on a number of outstanding problems. Several aspects of these new methods are addressed in this volume, which includes an introduction to motives of quadrics by A. Vishik, with various applications, notably to the splitting patterns of quadratic forms, papers by O. Izhboldin and N. Karpenko on Chow groups of quadrics and their stable birational equivalence, with application to the construction of fields with u-invariant 9, and a contribution in French by B. Kahn which lays out a general framework for the computation of the unramified cohomology groups of quadrics and other cellular varieties.