The motivation behind the definition of Cech cohomology

algebraic-geometryhomology-cohomologymotivation

From Hartshorne's Algebraic Geometry, chapter 3.4:

The Cech cohomology of a sheaf topological space wrt an open cover is defined as $\frac{ker(d_{i+1})}{im(d_i)}$, where $d$ is some operator involving alternating sums (I won't type out the full definition here as it's quite long, see the Wikipedia article for the full definition) .

While I understand the definition, where does this formula come from and how did mathematicians arrive at this definition?

There is theorem III.4.5 (isomorphism between Cech cohomology and derived functor cohomology in the case of a Noetherian separated scheme , quasicoherent sheaf and affine open cover). This is essentially the Cech to derived functor spectral sequence. Is it possible to reverse-engineer the definition from the spectral sequence?

Edit: I'm familiar with derived functor cohomology from chapter 3.1 of Hartshorne and chapter 17 from Dummit and Foote (including the construction of Ext and Tor). I think that's well-motivated in terms of making a long exact sequence from a short exact sequence.

I know some algebraic topology but only a little. I know about the fundamental group, homotopy equivalence, and deck transformations but that's it.

Best Answer

Cohomology theories are those algebraic objects measuring the obstructions of some extending or glueing problems. One of the origins of Cech cohomology is the Mittag-Leffler problem.

Let $S$ be a Riemann surface, the Mittag-Leffler problem asks that given a discrete set of points $\left \{p_n \right \} \subset S$, whether we can find a meromorphic function $f: S \longrightarrow \mathbb{C}$ holomorphic outside $\left \{p_n \right \}$ and has predescribed principal part (the principal part of a Laurent series $\sum_{k=-N}^{\infty}a_k z^k$ is $\sum_{k = -N}^{-1}a_kz^k$) at each $p_n$?

This problem is locally trivial, so the thing is just how can we glue all the local solutions. We take an open covering $\bigcup_{i\in I}U_i = S$ such that each $U_i$ contains at most one $p_n$ and there is a local solution $f_i$ on $U_i$. Solving the problem globally is equivalent to finding $g_i \in \mathcal{O}(U_i)$ such that $f_{ij} = f_i - f_j = g_j - g_i$ (hence $f = f_i + g_i$ is a global solution).

This is precisely the definition of the first Cech cohomology $$\check{H}^1(\left \{U_i \right \},\mathcal{O}) = \frac{\left \{ \left \{f_{ij} \right \} \mid f_{ij}+f_{jk}+f_{ki} = 0 \right \}}{\left \{ \left \{f_{ij} \right \} \mid \exists g_i: f_{ij} = g_j - g_i \right \}}.$$ Note. Philosophically, higher cohomology groups are direct generalizations of $H^1$ and a way to compute $H^1$.

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