On the Ext Analog of the Euler Characteristic

The Euler form is an Ext analog of the Euler characteristic, and in this paper we study the Euler form and give some applications. The first being a question of Jorgensen, which bounds the projective dimension of a module over a complete intersection by using the vanishing of self extensions. Our second application uses the Euler form to yield a new result involving the vanishing of the higher Herbrand difference. Along the way we translate some of our results to the graded setting.