The conformal dilatation and Beltrami forms over quadratic field extensions

The paper is devoted to an algebraic analogue of a geometric approach to the classical notion of complex dilatation suggested in the paper arXiv:1701.06259 [math.CV] by the author. At the same time it provides an invariant version of this geometric approach. From the algebraic point of view it is only natural to work with a general field extension K/k of degree 2 instead of the fields of real and complex number (under the assumption that the characteristic is not equal to 2). Given a k-linear map between two K-vector spaces of dimension 1 over K, there are two natural measures of deviation of this map from being K-linear: its conformal dilatation, defined in terms of quadratic forms over k, and its Beltrami form, directly generalizing the classical complex dilatation. It turns out that these two measures are related in the same way as in the classical case. Working with a general field extension does not lead to any new difficulties compared to the classical case, but only clarifies the algebraic aspects of the theory.