No label defined (Q4778690)

This monograph is a very short and elementary introduction to Grothendieck topologies (a topologized category) just to the definition of its most important example: the étale topology. This topology makes possible to define cohomology and homotopy invariants for abstract algebraic varieties and schemes and are essential to the proofs of the Riemann-Weil conjectures by P. Deligne. The exposition has four parts. In the first the author introduces the the language of categories and the necessary algebra (19 pages). In the second, categories of sheaves over a topological space are introduced (13 pages). In the third part the very general categorical concept ``Grotendieck topologies'' is introduced (17 pages). Finally in the last part the author introduces the étale topology (14 pages). This monograph corresponds to a short-course given by the author during the XIV School of Algebra in the Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada (IMPA) (Rio de Janeiro 1996).