We consider reduced Witt rings of finite chain length. We show there is a bound, in terms of the chain length and maximal signature, on the dimension of anisotropic, totally indefinite forms. From this we get the ascending chain condition on principal ideals and hence factorization of forms into products of irreducible forms. 2000 Mathematics Subject Classification: 11E81, 12D15

In this paper we define a notion of Witt group for sesquilinear forms in hermitian categories, which in turn provides a notion of Witt group for sesquilinear forms over rings with involution. We also study the extension of scalars for K-linear hermitian categories, where K is a field of characteristic 6= 2. We finally extend several results concerning sesquilinear forms to the setting of system...