All Questions
7 questions
66
votes
4
answers
11k
views
Is there a good way to think of vanishing cycles and nearby cycles?
Once in a while I run into literature that invokes vanishing cycle machinery with a cryptic sentence like, "this follows from a standard vanishing cycle argument." Is there a good way to look at ...
15
votes
1
answer
1k
views
Grothendieck - sheaves as meter sticks
I'm trying to read parts of McLarty's Grothendieck on Simplicity and Generality. In the article, I read Grothendieck thought of sheaves over some topological space as meter sticks measuring it.
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35
votes
5
answers
4k
views
Heuristic explanation of why we lose projectives in sheaves.
We know that presheaves of any category have enough projectives and that sheaves do not, why is this, and how does it effect our thinking?
This question was asked(and I found it very helpful) but I ...
25
votes
3
answers
5k
views
Stacks and sheaves
I'm a bit confused by the double role which sheaves play in the theory of stacks.
On the one hand, sheaves on a site are the obvious generalization of a sheaf on a topological space. On the other ...
16
votes
4
answers
2k
views
Coboundaries and Gluing in Cech Cohomology - Intuition?
I'm trying to develop an intuition for Cech cohomology geometrically, but am currently failing. A lot of people seem to say that the groups $H^n$ measure obstructions to gluing local sections to get ...
19
votes
6
answers
4k
views
Understanding Adjointness of Sheaves in Algebraic Geometry
Pushforward and pullback are very basic operations in algebraic geometry, as is the adjointness between them. I worked out a very careful of adjointness of sheaves (below) when I was working out of ...
13
votes
2
answers
3k
views
Interpreting $f^*f_*$
For a morphism of schemes $f: X\rightarrow Y$, one often considers the function $f^*f_*$ on sheaves. For example, this appears in adjunction for sheaves of $\mathcal{O}_X$-modules, the projection ...