Van Kampen theory for algebraic stacks. (Q699506)

There are various ways to generalize the notion of the fundamental group of a topological space to schemes and further to algebraic stacks. For algebraic stacks, the fundamental group can be either obtained using simplicial schemes or locally constant étale sheaves. In the first section, the authors reviews the definition of the fundamental progroupoid and the profinite fundamental groupoid of a locally connected topos. Applied to the category of locally constant étale sheaves, this gives a definition of the fundamental group and the profinite fundamental groupoid of an algebraic stack. The second section develops some background on 2-categories and the associated categories. In particular, the compatibility of this construction with fibered products is studied. Next, the author introduces a 2-category of coverings of an algebraic stack and shows that this can be used to compute the fundamental groupoid. Via a version for toposes, this approach is used to generalize the Seifert--van Kampen theorem to algebraic stacks.