Constructible sheaves and vanishing cycles

NCTS • Fall 2025 • Official course page

Time and place

Room 509, Cosmology Bldg., NTU Campus
Tuesdays 16:30 – 18:20, Wednesdays 10:20 – 12:10
Starting the week of October 13th, ending the week of January 6th.

Description

We will introduce the formalism of constructible sheaves on complex algebraic varieties, which is the basis for the cohomological study of the geometry and topology of algebraic varieties. In the first part, we will cover derived categories of sheaves, the six functors, constructibility, and Verdier duality. In the second part, we will study nearby and vanishing cycles sheaves, which are used to analyze the topology of degenerating families.

Lecture notes

Notes (up through Lecture 14.5)

Exercises

Sheet 1
Sheet 2
Sheet 3
Sheet 4
Sheet 5
Sheet 6
Sheet 7
Sheet 8
Sheet 9
Sheet 10
Sheet 11 (ungraded)
Sheet 12 (ungraded)

Selected solutions