Class numbers of ternary quadratic forms

G.L. Watson [13] and [14] introduced a set of transformations, called Watson transformations by most recent authors, in his study of the arithmetic of integral quadratic forms. These transformations change an integral quadratic form to another integral quadratic form with a smaller discriminant, but preserve many arithmetic properties at the same time. In this paper, we study the change of class numbers of positive definite ternary integral quadratic formula along a sequence of Watson transformations, thus providing a new and effective way to compute the class number of positive definite ternary integral quadratic forms. Explicit class number formulae for many genera of positive definite ternary integral quadratic forms are derived as illustrations of our method.