Places of Near-Fields: To Heinrich Wefelscheid

Wefelscheid (Untersuchungen über Fastkörper und Fastbereiche, Habilitationsschrift, Hamburg, 1971) generalised the well-known Theorem of Artin/Schreier about the characterization of formally real fields and the fundamental result of Baer/Krull to near-fields. In the last fifty years arose from the Theorem of Baer/Krull a theory, which analyses the entirety of the orderings of a field (E. Becker, L. Bröcker, M. Marshall et al.), as presented e.g. in the book by Lam (Orderings, valuations and quadratic forms, American Mathematical Society, Providence, 1983). At the centre of this theory are preorders and their compatibility with valuations or places. We develop some essential results of this theory for the near-field case. In particular, we derive the Brown/Marshall’s inequalities and Bröcker’s Theorem on the trivialisation of fans in the near-field case.