A Brief Note for Sheaf Structures on Posets

Abstract

This note is a part of the lecture notes of a graduate student algebraic geometry seminar held at the department of mathematics in National Taiwan Normal University, 2020 Falls. It aims to introduce an example of sheaves defined on posets equipped with the Alexandrov topology, called the cellular sheaves. A cellular sheaf is a functor from the category of a poset to the category of specific algebraic structures (e.g. the category of groups). Strictly speaking, even equipping the poset with the Alexandrov topology, it is just the definition of a pre-sheaf on the Alexandrov topological space. By checking details, cellular sheaves are actually sheaves on topological spaces. This is a well-known fact in sheaf theory via the Kan extension, while it requires readers who are familiar with the category theory. In this note, we follow an elementary approach to describe the connection between cellular sheaves and sheaves concerned in algebraic geometry, where only basic commutative algebra and point-set topology are required as the background knowledge.