seeing more math on the TL recently. i haven't mathposted in a long time but i'm still happy to field math questions from twitter peeps, just reply here or tag me or w/e. big meaty philosophical questions like "wtf are real numbers anyway" would be particularly fun for me rn
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eli5 sheaf
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5-year-olds do not need to know what sheaves are 😅 imo if you really want to get a handle on this better to dive into the history - why did anyone invent sheaves, what problems were they trying to solve. good place to start is differential equations
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e.g. there's a sheaf of solutions to the differential equation df / dz = 1 / z in the complex plane minus a point (namely, branches of the logarithm). this sheaf has no global sections, meaning there isn't a globally defined solution, but there are local ones
sheaves are the thing you invent trying to understand this "local vs. global" sort of stuff. this particular sheaf happens to be locally constant which is very nice b/c that means it can be described as a representation of the fundamental group, gets into that fun alg top
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