Cohomology ring

Last updated

In mathematics, specifically algebraic topology, the cohomology ring of a topological space X is a ring formed from the cohomology groups of X together with the cup product serving as the ring multiplication. Here 'cohomology' is usually understood as singular cohomology, but the ring structure is also present in other theories such as de Rham cohomology. It is also functorial: for a continuous mapping of spaces one obtains a ring homomorphism on cohomology rings, which is contravariant.

Contents

Specifically, given a sequence of cohomology groups Hk(X;R) on X with coefficients in a commutative ring R (typically R is Zn, Z, Q, R, or C) one can define the cup product, which takes the form

The cup product gives a multiplication on the direct sum of the cohomology groups

This multiplication turns H(X;R) into a ring. In fact, it is naturally an N-graded ring with the nonnegative integer k serving as the degree. The cup product respects this grading.

The cohomology ring is graded-commutative in the sense that the cup product commutes up to a sign determined by the grading. Specifically, for pure elements of degree k and ℓ; we have

A numerical invariant derived from the cohomology ring is the cup-length, which means the maximum number of graded elements of degree ≥ 1 that when multiplied give a non-zero result. For example, a complex projective space has cup-length equal to its complex dimension.

Examples

See also

Related Research Articles

In mathematics, more specifically in functional analysis, a Banach space is a complete normed vector space. Thus, a Banach space is a vector space with a metric that allows the computation of vector length and distance between vectors and is complete in the sense that a Cauchy sequence of vectors always converges to a well-defined limit that is within the space.

Distributions, also known as Schwartz distributions or generalized functions, are objects that generalize the classical notion of functions in mathematical analysis. Distributions make it possible to differentiate functions whose derivatives do not exist in the classical sense. In particular, any locally integrable function has a distributional derivative.

In mathematics, a formal series is an infinite sum that is considered independently from any notion of convergence, and can be manipulated with the usual algebraic operations on series.

In mathematics, in particular abstract algebra, a graded ring is a ring such that the underlying additive group is a direct sum of abelian groups such that . The index set is usually the set of nonnegative integers or the set of integers, but can be any monoid. The direct sum decomposition is usually referred to as gradation or grading.

In mathematics, specifically in homology theory and algebraic topology, cohomology is a general term for a sequence of abelian groups, usually one associated with a topological space, often defined from a cochain complex. Cohomology can be viewed as a method of assigning richer algebraic invariants to a space than homology. Some versions of cohomology arise by dualizing the construction of homology. In other words, cochains are functions on the group of chains in homology theory.

In mathematics, the adele ring of a global field is a central object of class field theory, a branch of algebraic number theory. It is the restricted product of all the completions of the global field and is an example of a self-dual topological ring.

In mathematics, in particular in algebraic topology, differential geometry and algebraic geometry, the Chern classes are characteristic classes associated with complex vector bundles. They have since become fundamental concepts in many branches of mathematics and physics, such as string theory, Chern–Simons theory, knot theory, Gromov–Witten invariants. Chern classes were introduced by Shiing-Shen Chern.

In algebraic geometry, motives is a theory proposed by Alexander Grothendieck in the 1960s to unify the vast array of similarly behaved cohomology theories such as singular cohomology, de Rham cohomology, etale cohomology, and crystalline cohomology. Philosophically, a "motif" is the "cohomology essence" of a variety.

In functional analysis and related areas of mathematics, locally convex topological vector spaces (LCTVS) or locally convex spaces are examples of topological vector spaces (TVS) that generalize normed spaces. They can be defined as topological vector spaces whose topology is generated by translations of balanced, absorbent, convex sets. Alternatively they can be defined as a vector space with a family of seminorms, and a topology can be defined in terms of that family. Although in general such spaces are not necessarily normable, the existence of a convex local base for the zero vector is strong enough for the Hahn–Banach theorem to hold, yielding a sufficiently rich theory of continuous linear functionals.

In mathematics, the Ext functors are the derived functors of the Hom functor. Along with the Tor functor, Ext is one of the core concepts of homological algebra, in which ideas from algebraic topology are used to define invariants of algebraic structures. The cohomology of groups, Lie algebras, and associative algebras can all be defined in terms of Ext. The name comes from the fact that the first Ext group Ext1 classifies extensions of one module by another.

In mathematics, specifically in algebraic topology, the cup product is a method of adjoining two cocycles of degree p and q to form a composite cocycle of degree p + q. This defines an associative (and distributive) graded commutative product operation in cohomology, turning the cohomology of a space X into a graded ring, H(X), called the cohomology ring. The cup product was introduced in work of J. W. Alexander, Eduard Čech and Hassler Whitney from 1935–1938, and, in full generality, by Samuel Eilenberg in 1944.

In abstract algebra, Hilbert's Theorem 90 (or Satz 90) is an important result on cyclic extensions of fields (or to one of its generalizations) that leads to Kummer theory. In its most basic form, it states that if L/K is an extension of fields with cyclic Galois group G = Gal(L/K) generated by an element and if is an element of L of relative norm 1, that is

In functional analysis and related areas of mathematics, a sequence space is a vector space whose elements are infinite sequences of real or complex numbers. Equivalently, it is a function space whose elements are functions from the natural numbers to the field K of real or complex numbers. The set of all such functions is naturally identified with the set of all possible infinite sequences with elements in K, and can be turned into a vector space under the operations of pointwise addition of functions and pointwise scalar multiplication. All sequence spaces are linear subspaces of this space. Sequence spaces are typically equipped with a norm, or at least the structure of a topological vector space.

In algebraic topology, a Steenrod algebra was defined by Henri Cartan to be the algebra of stable cohomology operations for mod cohomology.

In algebraic geometry, the Chow groups of an algebraic variety over any field are algebro-geometric analogs of the homology of a topological space. The elements of the Chow group are formed out of subvarieties in a similar way to how simplicial or cellular homology groups are formed out of subcomplexes. When the variety is smooth, the Chow groups can be interpreted as cohomology groups and have a multiplication called the intersection product. The Chow groups carry rich information about an algebraic variety, and they are correspondingly hard to compute in general.

In mathematics, in particular in algebraic topology, the Hopf invariant is a homotopy invariant of certain maps between n-spheres.

In mathematics, the Adams spectral sequence is a spectral sequence introduced by J. Frank Adams which computes the stable homotopy groups of topological spaces. Like all spectral sequences, it is a computational tool; it relates homology theory to what is now called stable homotopy theory. It is a reformulation using homological algebra, and an extension, of a technique called 'killing homotopy groups' applied by the French school of Henri Cartan and Jean-Pierre Serre.

In algebraic geometry, the Nisnevich topology, sometimes called the completely decomposed topology, is a Grothendieck topology on the category of schemes which has been used in algebraic K-theory, A¹ homotopy theory, and the theory of motives. It was originally introduced by Yevsey Nisnevich, who was motivated by the theory of adeles.

In algebraic topology, a complex-orientable cohomology theory is a multiplicative cohomology theory E such that the restriction map is surjective. An element of that restricts to the canonical generator of the reduced theory is called a complex orientation. The notion is central to Quillen's work relating cohomology to formal group laws.

In the mathematical discipline of functional analysis, a differentiable vector-valued function from Euclidean space is a differentiable function valued in a topological vector space (TVS) whose domains is a subset of some finite-dimensional Euclidean space. It is possible to generalize the notion of derivative to functions whose domain and codomain are subsets of arbitrary topological vector spaces (TVSs) in multiple ways. But when the domain of a TVS-valued function is a subset of a finite-dimensional Euclidean space then many of these notions become logically equivalent resulting in a much more limited number of generalizations of the derivative and additionally, differentiability is also more well-behaved compared to the general case. This article presents the theory of -times continuously differentiable functions on an open subset of Euclidean space , which is an important special case of differentiation between arbitrary TVSs. This importance stems partially from the fact that every finite-dimensional vector subspace of a Hausdorff topological vector space is TVS isomorphic to Euclidean space so that, for example, this special case can be applied to any function whose domain is an arbitrary Hausdorff TVS by restricting it to finite-dimensional vector subspaces.

References