Rabinowitsch in Translation

One of our projects in number theory led us to thinking about the class number problem, which has a story too long and interesting to recount here. See the survey of Goldfeld from an old AMS Bulletin to get an overview. Briefly, the question is about the degree to which unique factorization holds in quadratic extensions of the rational numbers.  In any case, one of the first important results in the program is an old theorem of G. Rabinowitsch (Rabinowitz), which gives a testable criterion for whether the number field \Q(\sqrt{D}), with D a negative integer, possesses unique factorization. In modernish language (cf. Theorem 6 in the linked-to document), keeping this framework we have:

Theorem (Rabinowitsch, 1913): The field \Q(D) is a unique factorization domain (UFD) if and only if x^2-x+ m is prime for all x\in \{1,2, \dots, n\}, where D=1-4m.

The paper was published in German in Crelle’s journal over a century ago, and was somewhat hard to find on its own. We could not locate any other source where the content has been rewritten since then, so we translated and typeset the article (with the aid of various online translation tools). To preserve the spirit and style of the writing, some outdated and perhaps idiosyncratic (to author or translator, as the case may be) jargon has been allowed to survive. These designations are hopefully all made clear within the article so it is readable. Some notation has been modified for clarity.

Perhaps one day this material can be condensed and fully modernised. The article consists mostly of pleasant and clean elementary number theory, situated near the headwaters of one of the important achievements of 20th century number theory. It seems worthy of further propagation, so we post here our translation (no warranty included).

Rabinowitsch