The Apollonius-Toën circles

Interlude II: Derived Geometry (2000)

Remark 4.1

In Serre’s formula, the chain complex

\[ R/I_{Diag}\otimes _R^{\textcolor{purple}{\mathbb {L}}}R/I_{Axis} \]

is seen as a linear object and lacks a direct geometric interpretation within the framework of Grothendieck’s scheme theory.

Derived algebraic geometry is built from the following facts:

Fact 4.2
  • The chain complex given by the derived tensor product

    \[ A=R/I_{Diag}\otimes _R^{\textcolor{purple}{\mathbb {L}}}R/I_{Axis} \]

    is a ring-object in the chain complexes (\(\mathbf{cdga}\)).

  • (Toën-Vezzosi, Lurie, 2002) Any \(\mathbf{cdga}\) has a geometric interpretation as the (derived) ring of functions on a space. More precisely, for any cdga A we can assign a geometric object, \(\textcolor{blue}{\mathsf{Spec}(A)} \) a derived affine scheme, such that \(\text{Functions}( \textcolor{blue}{\mathsf{Spec}(A)} )=A\).

  • (Toën-Vezzosi, Lurie, 2002) Affine derived schemes can be glued up to quasi-isomorphisms of cdga’s.

  • Any derived scheme has an underlying classical scheme, obtained by discarding the higher homology groups of the cdga.

The collection of all derived schemes forms an \((\infty ,1)-\text{category}\) \(\mathbf{dSch}\) which contains the category of Grothendieck’s schemes as a full subcategory.

Remark 4.3

By construction, intersections in \(\mathbf{dSch}\) automatically account for Serre’s formula.