Local cohomology

rdf:langString Local cohomology

rdf:langString In algebraic geometry, local cohomology is an algebraic analogue of relative cohomology. Alexander Grothendieck introduced it in seminars in Harvard in 1961 written up by , and in 1961-2 at IHES written up as SGA2 - , republished as . Given a function (more generally, a section of a quasicoherent sheaf) defined on an open subset of an algebraic variety (or scheme), local cohomology measures the obstruction to extending that function to a larger domain. The rational function , for example, is defined only on the complement of on the affine line over a field , and cannot be extended to a function on the entire space. The local cohomology module (where is the coordinate ring of ) detects this in the nonvanishing of a cohomology class . In a similar manner, is defined away from the and axes in the affine plane, but cannot be extended to either the complement of the -axis or the complement of the -axis alone (nor can it be expressed as a sum of such functions); this obstruction corresponds precisely to a nonzero class in the local cohomology module . Outside of algebraic geometry, local cohomology has found applications in commutative algebra, combinatorics, and certain kinds of partial differential equations.