Descent (category Theory) - History

History

The ideas were developed in the period 1955-1965 (which was roughly the time at which the requirements of algebraic topology were met but those of algebraic geometry were not). From the point of view of abstract category theory the work of comonads of Beck was a summation of those ideas; see Beck's monadicity theorem.

The difficulties of algebraic geometry with passage to the quotient are acute. The urgency (to put it that way) of the problem for the geometers accounts for the title of the 1959 Grothendieck seminar TDTE on theorems of descent and techniques of existence (see FGA) connecting the descent question with the representable functor question in algebraic geometry in general, and the moduli problem in particular.

Read more about this topic:  Descent (category Theory)

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.
    Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)

    The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother—both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child’s history is never finished.
    Terri Apter (20th century)

    We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)