Sheaves that fail to represent matrix rings

Abstract

There are two fundamental obstructions to representing noncommutative rings via sheaves. First, there is no subcanonical coverage on the opposite of the category of rings that includes all covering families in the big Zariski site. Second, there is no contravariant functor F from the category of rings to the category of ringed categories whose composite with the global sections functor is naturally isomorphic to the identity, such that F restricts to the Zariski spectrum functor Spec on the category of commutative rings (in a compatible way with the natural isomorphism). Both of these no-go results are proved by restricting attention to matrix rings.