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Abstract

In 1801, Gauss found an explicit description, in the language of binary quadratic forms, for the 2-torsion of the narrow class group and dual narrow class group of a quadratic number field. This is now known as Gauss's genus theory. In this paper we extend Gauss's work to the setting of multi-quadratic number fields. To this end, we introduce and parametrize the categories of expansion groups and expansion Lie algebras, giving an explicit description for the universal objects of these categories. This description is inspired by the ideas of Smith \cite{smith2} in his recent breakthrough on Goldfeld's conjecture and the Cohen--Lenstra conjectures.
Our main result shows that the maximal unramified multi-quadratic extension L of a multi-quadratic number field K can be reconstructed from the set of generalized governing expansions supported in the set of primes that ramify in K. This provides an explicit description for the group Gal(L/Q) and a systematic procedure to construct the field L.
A special case of our main result gives a sharp upper bound for the size of Cl+(K)[2]. For every positive integer n, we find infinitely many multi-quadratic number fields K such that [K:Q] equals 2n and Gal(L/Q) is a universal expansion group. Such fields K are obtained using Smith's notion of additive systems and their basic Ramsey-theoretic behavior.