Loch has long since stopped being just a hobby for us; Irons has his writing, Treellama as a programmer has his dead rats and tampons, and I have my cohomology. To illustrate my point, I’ve partially copied some notes over I wrote about using homotopy sheaves to enlarge the category of spaces for which we can build ordinary cohomology. Without further ado:

A recurring theme in the foundations of things connected to topology is an inability to geometrically describe what cohomology “means” above the first few bottom degrees. This problem has also been regularly resolved by introducing homotopy closer to the bottom of the pyramid, so to speak; for instance, Quillen’s +-construction (which gave way to full-blown algebraic K-theory) was built by introducing a kind of homotopy to algebraic geometry, rather than trying to build the algebraic K-theory functors in isolation of their homotopy-theoretic roots, which is basically what had been going on before that. (As reference, look at the Wikipedia article‘s subsection on the lower groups.) For exceedingly polite rings, their algebraic K-theory is known for formal reasons — and while this seems like an egregious sin in the context of algebra, the exact same thing is going on in the classical cohomology of spaces.

Namely, for nice spaces, one way to build the cohomology is to produce the singular chain complex of the space, dualize, and find its cohomology; the roots of this construction are in producing maps from the n-simplex into our space, and the amount of such maps depends upon how coarse the topology is on the target space. Namely, the coarser the better. Another definition is to think about maps from our space out into a representing space for cohomology, called an Eilenberg-Maclane space; this approach yields a lot of information when the topology is fine. On CW-complexes (or other similar models for nice spaces), these two definitions agree, but in the general category of spaces they produce quite different results. Furthermore, since neither coarse nor fine topologies are “good”, neither approach seems universally better than the other. This is a problem we ought to rectify.

Another face of cohomology comes from the interpretation in terms of principal G-bundles: a cohomology class [f] in H¹(X; G) corresponds to a map f: X → K(G, 1) = BG, where BG is the “classifying space” of G, used in the sense that BG supports a principal G-bundle EG → BG such that EG is a contractible space. Pulling EG back along f gives an evident map from Hom(X, K(G, 1) to isomorphism classes of principal G-bundles over X. If we consider f up to homotopy, then this association is injective — and because EG is contractible, this association is surjective, so cohomology classes in degree 1 can be interpreted as principal G-bundles over X.

If we assert that G is discrete, then we can also say that these are the same as sheaves over X whose stalks are (coherently) isomorphic to G. The back-and-forth between sheaves and covering spaces is a point of view with incredible clarity, so we’d better take time out to explain. The first general assertion is that to any map of spaces Y → X, we can build a sheaf ΓY over X, called the sheaf of sections, where the elements associated to an open set U in X are the continuous maps U → Y such that the composition U → Y → X is the identity on U. The second general assertion (and this is the incredible one) is that this example is generic — i.e., given any sheaf F over X we can build a space Y over X such that the sheaf of sections of Y is isomorphic to the original sheaf! Y is called the étale space of F, and we denote it as Ét(F).

How do we build such a thing? We must satisfy the key condition that any element of F(U) should correspond to a section of our map Y → X over U. We should start by building the set of points Ét(F) = ∪_{x ∈ X} F_x consisting of all the stalks of F; this comes with a map back down to X by picking a point in Ét(F) and sending it to the point in X that owns its parent stalk. We now need to induce a topology so we can control what sections are continuous. This step is actually kind of obvious, once we’ve made it this far: pick an element f in F(U), and let f_x be the element in the stalk F_x corresponding to the restriction of f. Finally, declare the union ∪_{x ∈ U} f_x to be open in Ét(F), and consider f as the map f: U → Ét(F) that takes x to f_x. f is continuous and a section of the projection Ét(F) → X, and one can show that these are the only sections that this topology admits. So we’re done! In addition, it can be shown that the map Ét(F) → X is a “local homeomorphism,” in the sense that restricting to a small neighborhood in Ét(F) makes the projection into a homeomorphism down to X.

(As an aside, we can build this same object for presheaves, which produces a sheaf that comes with an isomorphism on stalks back to the original presheaf. This process is called “sheafification,” and it’s what powers topos theory as built on top of sheaves.)

So this lets us talk about G-cohomology classes in X of degree 1 as certain kinds of sheaves over X. But what about the other degrees? It is remarkably unclear how to proceed; any K-theory-styled operations that we learn about from studying principal bundles will produce more principal bundles, and we’ll never escape H¹, so they’re of no use. The critical thing to note is that if we’re extremely careful, we can build BG in such a way that it too is an abelian topological group. We can then iterate this construction to produce BBG, which turns out to be a K(G, 2), and it supports a contractible BG-bundle we call EBG. Again, isomorphism classes of BG-bundles over X correspond to second degree G-cohomology classes of X as induced by the pullback of EBG.

But this turns out to be much harder to translate into the language of sheaves. The core problem is that the subspace corresponding to any particular stalk in Ét(F) is necessarily discrete, whereas principal BG-bundles emphatically do not have discrete fibers — their fibers are, of course, isomorphic to BG. This is a direct consequence of the convention that sheaves take values in the category of sets — which we consider here as the subcategory of spaces consisting of homotopy 0-types. If we generalize our notion of “sheaf” to allow them to take on values in the category of homotopy 1-types, then we can perform a very similar construction to the one above that translates G-bundles into sheaves with stalks coherently isomorphic to G — but instead, we translate BG-bundles (i.e., cohomology 2-classes) into certain kinds of stacks, and in particular, BBG is the classifying stack of the topological group BG.

There’s no reason to stop here! If we reformulate our definition of sheaf to allow our sheaves to assign open sets to arbitrary spaces, then we achieve the flexibility that we need to translate Hⁿ(X; G) into the context of sheaves for arbitrary n. This is one of the core motivations for Lurie’s work on “homotopy topoi,” which he graciously took the time to write a book about. A sizable portion of that book is also dedicated to developing a good theory of (∞, 1)-categories, which he calls ∞-categories and more traditional methods call either quasicategories (like Joyal) or weak Kan complexes (like Boardman and Vogt).

The transfer to topoi is part of this general practice of “enlarging” your data. The reason we care about schemes is that they’re like rings with the localization data made explicit; the localization was always there, but now we can handle it somehow explicitly. The reason we care about a category of sheaves over a space (i.e., a topos) is that it’s supposed to contain all the data that can be detected by strictly gluing “things” together — i.e., all the data that (sheaf) cohomology can detect about the space. That data was already there — the only thing the space dictates is how the gluing has to happen, which is encoded in the topos. The reason we care about homotopy topoi is that they contain all the data that general cohomology can detect, i.e., a tool that allows for patching data together up to higher coherent isomorphism. Again, this data is all “in” the space, but transferring to these larger categories where we deal with representations of the data is terribly useful for manipulating it.

There’s a trade-off, of course; namely, these homotopy sheaves don’t have a built-in notion of algebra, and we know that restricting to module-valued cohomology theories produces all kinds of strong representability results. It would be nice to understand the usual algebraic structures we’ve come to expect on ordinary cohomology in this homotopy sheaf context — what procedure can we follow to build the “product” of two G-bundles, itself a BG-bundle? What do the Steenrod operations look like, and how do we produce them? These are — to me, at least — questions with nonobvious answers, though it’s not clear that trying to come up with an answer would yield any kind of valuable information about homotopy sheaves in general, but instead just about these particularly algebraic structures. (And we already understand them classically, so…)

That’s enough dense loch for one post, I think. The point is that you can get paid for such nonsense (though not well). JFO: not for nothing.