During the academic year 1980-1981 I was teaching at the Technion-the Israeli Institute of Technology-in Haifa. The audience was small, but con­ sisted of particularly gifted and eager listeners; unfortunately, their back­ ground varied widely. What could one offer such an audience, so as to do justice to all of them? I decided to discuss representations of natural integers as sums of squares, starting on the most elementary level, but with the inten­ tion of pushing ahead as far as possible in some of the different directions that offered themselves (quadratic forms, theory of genera, generalizations and modern developments, etc.), according to the interests of the