This page is a detailed introduction to homological algebra. Starting with motivation from basic homotopy theory, it introduces the basics of the category of chain complexes and then develops the concepts of derived categories and derived functors in homological algebra, with the main examples of Ext and Tor. The last chapter introduces and proves the fundamental theorems of the field.
For the application to spectral sequences see at Introduction to Spectral Sequences.
For background/outlook on abstract homotopy theory see at Introduction to Homotopy Theory.
For generalization to stable homotopy theory see at Introduction to Stable homotopy theory.
This text is a first introduction to homological algebra, assuming only very basic prerequisites. For instance we do recall in some detail basic definitions and constructions in the theory of abelian groups and modules, though of course a prior familiarity with these ingredients will be helpful. Also we use very little category theory, if it all. Where universal constructions do appear we spell them out explicitly in components and just mention their category-theoretic names for those readers who want to dig deeper. We do however freely use the words functor and commuting diagram. The reader unfamiliar with these elementary notions should click on these keywords and follow the hyperlink to the explanation right now.
The subject of homological algebra may be motivated by its archetypical application, which is the singular homology of a topological space . This example illustrates homological algebra as being concerned with the abelianization of what is called the homotopy theory of .
So we begin with some basic concepts in homotopy theory in section 1) Homotopy type of topological spaces. Then we consider the “abelianization” of this setup in 2) Simplicial and abelian homology.
Together this serves to motivate many constructions in homological algebra, such as centrally chain complexes, chain maps and homology, but also chain homotopies, mapping cones etc, which we discuss in detail in chapter II below. In the bulk we develop the general theory of homological algebra in chapter III and chapter IV. Finally we come back to a systematic discussion of the relation to homotopy theory at the end in chapter V. A section Outlook is appended for readers interested in the grand scheme of things.
We do use some basic category theory language in the following, but no actual category theory. The reader should know what a category is, what a functor is and what a commuting diagram is. These concepts are more elementary than any genuine concept in homological algebra to appear below and of general use. Where we do encounter universal constructions below we call them by their category-theoretic name but always spell them out in components explicity.
This section reviews some basic notions in topology and homotopy theory. These will all serve as blueprints for corresponding notions in homological algebra.
A topological space is a set equipped with a set of subsets , called open sets, which are closed under
The Cartesian space with its standard notion of open subsets given by unions of open balls .
For an injection of sets and a topology on , the subspace topology on is .
For , the topological n-simplex is, up to homeomorphism, the topological space whose underlying set is the subset
of the Cartesian space , and whose topology is the subspace topology induces from the canonical topology in .
For this is the point, .
For this is the standard interval object .
For this is the filled triangle.
For this is the filled tetrahedron.
A homomorphisms between topological spaces is a continuous function:
a function of the underlying sets such that the preimage of every open set of is an open set of .
Topological spaces with continuous maps between them form the category Top.
For , and , the th -face (inclusion) of the topological -simplex, def. , is the subspace inclusion
induced under the coordinate presentation of def. , by the inclusion
which “omits” the th canonical coordinate:
The inclusion
is the inclusion
of the “right” end of the standard interval. The other inclusion
is that of the “left” end .
For and the th degenerate -simplex (projection) is the surjective map
induced under the barycentric coordinates of def. under the surjection
which sends
For Top and , a singular -simplex in is a continuous map
from the topological -simplex, def. , to .
Write
for the set of singular -simplices of .
As varies, this forms the singular simplicial complex of . This is the topic of the next section, see def. def. .
For two continuous functions between topological spaces, a left homotopy is a commuting diagram in Top of the form
In words this says that a homotopy between two continuous functions and is a continuous 1-parameter deformation of to . That deformation parameter is the canonical coordinate along the interval , hence along the “length” of the cylinder .
Left homotopy is an equivalence relation on .
The fundamental invariants of a topological space in the context of homotopy theory are its homotopy groups. We first review the first homotopy group, called the fundamental group of :
For a topological space and a point. A loop in based at is a continuous function
from the topological 1-simplex, such that .
A based homotopy between two loops is a homotopy
such that .
This notion of based homotopy is an equivalence relation.
This is directly checked. It is also a special case of the general discussion at homotopy.
Given two loops , define their concatenation to be the loop
Concatenation of loops respects based homotopy classes where it becomes an associative, unital binary pairing with inverses, hence the product in a group.
For a topological space and a point, the set of based homotopy equivalence classes of based loops in equipped with the group structure from prop. is the fundamental group or first homotopy group of , denoted
The fundamental group of the point is trivial: .
This construction has a fairly straightforward generalizations to “higher dimensional loops”.
Let be a topological space and a point. For , the th homotopy group of at is the group:
whose elements are left-homotopy equivalence classes of maps in ;
composition is given by gluing at the base point (wedge sum) of representatives.
The 0th homotopy group is taken to be the set of connected components.
The homotopy theory of topological spaces is all controled by the following notion. The abelianization of this notion, the notion of quasi-isomorphism discussed in def. below is central to homological algebra.
For Top two topological spaces, a continuous function between them is called a weak homotopy equivalence if
induces an isomorphism of connected components
in Set;
for all points and for all induces an isomorphism on homotopy groups
in Grp.
What is called homotopy theory is effectively the study of topological spaces not up to isomorphism (here: homeomorphism), but up to weak homotopy equivalence. Similarly, we will see that homological algebra is effectively the study of chain complexes not up to isomorphism, but up to quasi-isomorphism. But this is slightly more subtle than it may seem, in parts due to the following:
The existence of a weak homotopy equivalence from to is a reflexive and transitive relation on Top, but it is not a symmetric relation.
Reflexivity and transitivity are trivially checked. A counterexample to symmetry is the weak homotopy equivalence between the stanard circle and the pseudocircle.
But we can consider the genuine equivalence relation generated by weak homotopy equivalence:
We say two spaces and have the same (weak) homotopy type if they are equivalent under the equivalence relation generated by weak homotopy equivalence.
Equivalently this means that and have the same (weak) homotopy type if there exists a zigzag of weak homotopy equivalences
One can understand the homotopy type of a topological space just in terms of its homotopy groups and how they act on each other. (This data is called a Postnikov tower of .) But computing and handling homotopy groups is in general hard, famously so already for the seemingly simple case of the homotopy groups of spheres. Therefore we now want to simplify the situation by passing to a “linear/abelian approximation”.
This section discusses how the “abelianization” of a topological space by singular chains gives rise to the notion of chain complexes and their homology.
Above in def. we saw that to a topological space is associated a sequence of sets
of singular simplices. Since the topological -simplices from def. sit inside each other by the face inclusions of def.
and project onto each other by the degeneracy maps, def.
we dually have functions
that send each singular -simplex to its -face and functions
that regard an -simplex as beign a degenerate (“thin”) -simplex. All these sets of simplices and face and degeneracy maps between them form the following structure.
A simplicial set is
for each injective map of totally ordered sets
a function – the th face map on -simplices;
for each surjective map of totally ordered sets
a function – the th degeneracy map on -simplices;
such that these functions satisfy the simplicial identities.
The simplicial identities satisfied by face and degeneracy maps as above are (whenever these maps are composable as indicated):
if ,
if .
It is straightforward to check by explicit inspection that the evident injection and restriction maps between the sets of singular simplices make into a simplicial set. We now briefly indicate a systematic way to see this using basic category theory, but the reader already satisfied with this statement should jump ahead to the abelianization of in prop. below.
The simplex category is the full subcategory of Cat on the free categories of the form
This is called the “simplex category” because we are to think of the object as being the “spine” of the -simplex. For instance for we think of as the “spine” of the triangle. This becomes clear if we don’t just draw the morphisms that generate the category , but draw also all their composites. For instance for we have_
A functor
from the opposite category of the simplex category to the category Set of sets is canonically identified with a simplicial set, def. .
One checks by inspection that the simplicial identities characterize precisely the behaviour of the morphisms in and .
This makes the following evident:
The topological simplices from def. arrange into a cosimplicial object in Top, namely a functor
With this now the structure of a simplicial set on the singular simplices , def. , is manifest: it is just the nerve of with respect to , namely:
For a topological space its simplicial set of singular simplicies (often called the singular simplicial complex)
is given by composition of the functor from example with the hom functor of Top:
It turns out that homotopy type of the topological space is entirely captured by its singular simplicial complex (this is the content of the homotopy hypothesis-theorem).
Now we abelianize the singular simplicial complex in order to make it simpler and hence more tractable.
A formal linear combination of elements of a set Set is a function
such that only finitely many of the values are non-zero.
Identifying an element with the function , which sends to and all other elements to 0, this is written as
In this expression one calls the coefficient of in the formal linear combination.
For Set, the group of formal linear combinations is the group whose underlying set is that of formal linear combinations, def. , and whose group operation is the pointwise addition in :
For the present purpose the following statement may be regarded as just introducing different terminology for the group of formal linear combinations:
The group is the free abelian group on .
For a simplicial set, def. , the free abelian group is called the group of (simplicial) -chains on .
For a topological space, an -chain on the singular simplicial complex is called a singular -chain on .
This construction makes the sets of simplices into abelian groups. But this allows to formally add the different face maps in the simplicial set to one single boundary map:
For a simplicial set, its alternating face map differential in degree is the linear map
defined on basis elements to be the alternating sum of the simplicial face maps:
The simplicial identity, def. part (1), implies that the alternating sum boundary map of def. squares to 0:
By linearity, it is sufficient to check this on a basis element . There we compute as follows:
Here
the first equality is (1);
the second is (1) together with the linearity of ;
the third is obtained by decomposing the sum into two summands;
the fourth finally uses the simplicial identity def. (1) in the first summand;
the fifth relabels the summation index by ;
the last one observes that the resulting two summands are negatives of each other.
Let be a topological space. Let be a singular 1-simplex, regarded as a 1-chain
Then its boundary is
or graphically (using notation as for orientals)
In particular is a 1-cycle precisely if , hence precisely if is a loop.
Let be a singular 2-chain. The boundary is
Hence the boundary of the boundary is:
For a simplicial set, we call the collection
of abelian groups of chains , prop. ;
(for all ) the alternating face map chain complex of :
Specifically for we call this the singular chain complex of .
This motivates the general definition:
A chain complex of abelian groups is a collection of abelian groups together with group homomorphisms such that .
We turn to this definition in more detail in the next section. The thrust of this construction lies in the fact that the chain complex remembers the abelianized fundamental group of , as well as aspects of the higher homotopy groups: in its chain homology.
For a chain complex as in def. , and for we say
By linearity of the boundaries and cycles form abelian sub-groups of the group of chains, and we write
for the group of -boundaries, and
for the group of -cycles.
This means that a singular chain is a cycle if the formal linear combination of the oriented boundaries of all its constituent singular simplices sums to 0.
More generally, for any unital ring one can form the degreewise free module over . The corresponding homology is the singular homology with coefficients in , denoted . This generality we come to below in the next section.
For a chain complex as in def. and for , the degree- chain homology group is the quotient group
of the -cycles by the -boundaries – where for we declare that and hence .
Specifically, the chain homology of is called the singular homology of the topological space .
One usually writes or just for the singular homology of in degree .
So .
For a topological space we have that the degree-0 singular homology
is the free abelian group on the set of connected components of .
For a compact connected, orientable manifold of dimension we have
The precise choice of this isomorphism is a choice of orientation on . With a choice of orientation, the element under this identification is called the fundamental class
of the manifold .
Given a continuous map between topological spaces, and given , every singular -simplex in is sent to a singular -simplex
in . This is called the push-forward of along . Accordingly there is a push-forward map on groups of singular chains
These push-forward maps make all diagrams of the form
commute.
It is in fact evident that push-forward yields a functor of singular simplicial complexes
From this the statement follows since is a functor.
Therefore we have an “abelianized analog” of the notion of topological space:
For two chain complexes, def. , a homomorphism between them – called a chain map – is for each a homomorphism of abelian groups, such that :
Composition of such chain maps is given by degreewise composition of their components. Clearly, chain complexes with chain maps between them hence form a category – the category of chain complexes in abelian groups, – which we write
Accordingly we have:
Sending a topological space to its singular chain complex , def. , and a continuous map to its push-forward chain map, prop. , constitutes a functor
from the category Top of topological spaces and continuous maps, to the category of chain complexes.
In particular for each singular homology extends to a functor
We close this section by stating the basic properties of singular homology, which make precise the sense in which it is an abelian approximation to the homotopy type of . The proof of these statements requires some of the tools of homological algebra that we develop in the later chapters, as well as some tools in algebraic topology.
If is a continuous map between topological spaces which is a weak homotopy equivalence, def, , then the induced morphism on singular homology groups
is an isomorphism.
(A proof (via CW approximations) is spelled out for instance in (Hatcher, prop. 4.21)).
We therefore also have an “abelian analog” of weak homotopy equivalences:
For two chain complexes, a chain map is called a quasi-isomorphism if it induces isomorphisms on all homology groups:
In summary: chain homology sends weak homotopy equivalences to quasi-isomorphisms. Quasi-isomorphisms of chain complexes are the abelianized analog of weak homotopy equivalences of topological spaces.
In particular we have the analog of prop. :
The relation “There exists a quasi-isomorphism from to .” is a reflexive and transitive relation, but it is not a symmetric relation.
Reflexivity and transitivity are evident. An explicit counter-example showing the non-symmetry is the chain map
from the chain complex concentrated on the morphism of multiplication by 2 on integers, to the chain complex concentrated on the cyclic group of order 2.
This clearly induces an isomorphism on all homology groups. But there is not even a non-zero chain map in the other direction, since there is no non-zero group homomorphism .
Accordingly, as for homotopy types of topological spaces, in homological algebra one regards two chain complexes , as essentially equivalent – “of the same weak homology type” – if there is a zigzag of quasi-isomorphisms
between them. This is made precise by the central notion of the derived category of chain complexes. We turn to this below in section Derived categories and derived functors.
But quasi-isomorphisms are a little coarser than weak homotopy equivalences. The singular chain functor forgets some of the information in the homotopy types of topological spaces. The following series of statements characterizes to some extent what exactly is lost when passing to singular homology, and which information is in fact retained.
First we need a comparison map:
(Hurewicz homomorphism)
For a pointed topological space, the Hurewicz homomorphism is the function
from the th homotopy group of to the th singular homology group defined by sending
a representative singular -sphere in to the push-forward along of the fundamental class , example .
For a topological space the Hurewicz homomorphism in degree 0 exhibits an isomorphism between the free abelian group on the set of path connected components of and the degree-0 singular homlogy:
Since a homotopy group in positive degree depends on the homotopy type of the connected component of the base point, while the singular homology does not depend on a basepoint, it is interesting to compare these groups only for the case that is connected.
For a path-connected topological space the Hurewicz homomorphism in degree 1
is surjective. Its kernel is the commutator subgroup of . Therefore it induces an isomorphism from the abelianization :
For higher connected we have the
This is known as the Hurewicz theorem.
This gives plenty of motivation for studying
of chain complexes. This is essentially what homological algebra is about. In the next section we start to develop these notions more systematically.
Chain complexes of modules with chain maps between them form a category, the category of chain complexes, which is where all of homological algebra takes place. We first construct this category and discuss its most fundamental properties in 3) Categories of chain complexes . Then we consider more interesting properties of this category: the most elementary and still already profoundly useful is the phenomenon of exact sequences and specifically of homology exact sequences, discussed in 4) Homology exact sequences. In 5) Homotopy fiber sequences and mapping cones we explain how these are the shadow under the homology functor of homotopy fiber sequences of chain complexes constructed using mapping cones. The construction of the connecting homomorphism obtained this way may be understood as a special case of the basic diagram chasing lemmas in double complexes, such as the snake lemma, which we discuss in 6) Double complexes and the diagram chasing lemmas.
This serves to provide a rich set of tools that is needed when in the next chaper Abelian homotopy theory we turn to the actual category of interest, which is not quite that of chain complexes and chain maps, but the localization of this at the quasi-isomorphisms: the derived category.
In def. we had encountered complexes of singular chains, of formal linear combinations of simplices in a topological space. Here we discuss such chain complexes in their own right in a bit more depth.
Also, above a singular chain was taken to be a formal sum of singular simplices with coefficients in the abelian group of integers . It is just as straightforward, natural and useful to allow the coefficients to be an arbitrary abelian group , or in fact to be a module over a ring. We have to postpone proper discussion of motivating examples for this step below in chapter III and chapter IV, but the reader eager to see a deeper motivation right now might look at Modules – As generalized vector bundles. See also the archetypical example below.
So we start by developing a bit of the theory of abelian groups, rings and modules.
Write Ab Cat for the category of abelian groups and group homomorphisms between them:
an object is a group such that for all elements we have that the group product of with is the same as that of with , which we write (and the neutral element is denoted by );
a morphism is a group homomorphism, hence a function of the underlying sets, such that for all elements as above .
Among the basic constructions that produce new abelian groups from given ones are the tensor product of abelian groups and the direct sum of abelian groups. These we discuss now.
For , and abelian groups and the cartesian product group, a bilinear map
is a function of the underlying sets which is linear – hence is a group homomorphism – in each argument separately.
In terms of elements this means that a bilinear map is a function of sets that satisfies for all elements and the two relations
and
Notice that this is not a group homomorphism out of the product group. The product group is the group whose elements are pairs with and , and whose group operation is
hence satisfies
and hence in particular
which is (in general) different from the behaviour of a bilinear map.
For two abelian groups, their tensor product of abelian groups is the abelian group which is the quotient group of the free group on the product (direct sum) by the relations
for all and .
In words: it is the group whose elements are presented by pairs of elements in and and such that the group operation for one argument fixed is that of the other group in the other argument.
There is a canonical function of the underlying sets
On elements this sends to the equivalence class that it represents under the above equivalence relations.
A function of underlying sets is a bilinear function precisely if it factors by the morphism of through a group homomorphism out of the tensor product:
Equipped with the tensor product of def. Ab becomes a monoidal category.
The unit object in is the additive group of integers .
This means:
forming the tensor product is a functor in each argument
there is an associativity natural isomorphism which is “coherent” in the sense that all possible ways of using it to rebracket a given expression are equal.
There is a unit natural isomorphism which is compatible with the asscociativity isomorphism in the evident sense.
To see that is the unit object, consider for any abelian group the map
which sends for
Due to the quotient relation defining the tensor product, the element on the left is also equal to
This shows that is in fact an isomorphism.
The other properties are similarly direct to check.
We see simple but useful examples of tensor products of abelian groups put to work below in the context of example and then in many of the applications to follow. An elementary but not entirely trivial example that may help to illustrate the nature of the tensor product is the following.
For and positive, we have
where denotes the least common multiple, whereas
where denotes the greatest common divisor.
Let Set be a set and an -indexed family of abelian groups. The direct sum is the coproduct of these objects in Ab.
This means: the direct sum is an abelian group equipped with a collection of homomorphisms
which is characterized (up to unique isomorphism) by the following universal property: for every other abelian group equipped with maps
there is a unique homomorphism such that for all .
Explicitly in terms of elements we have:
The direct sum is the abelian group whose ements are formal sums
of finitely many elements of the , with addition given by componentwise addition in the corresponding .
If each , then the direct sum is again the free abelian group on
The tensor product of abelian groups distributes over arbitrary direct sums:
For and , the direct sum of copies of with itself is equivalently the tensor product of abelian groups of the free abelian group on with :
Together, tensor product and direct sum of abelian groups make Ab into what is called a bimonoidal category.
This now gives us enough structure to define rings and consider basic examples of their modules.
A ring (unital and not-necessarily commutative) is an abelian group equipped with
an element
a bilinear operation, hence a group homomorphism
out of the tensor product of abelian groups,
such that this is associative and unital with respect to 1.
The integers are a ring under the standard addition and multiplication operation.
For each , this induces a ring structure on the cyclic group , given by operations in modulo .
The rational numbers , real numbers and complex numbers are rings under their standard operations (in fact these are even fields).
For a ring, the polynomials
(for arbitrary ) in a variable with coefficients in form another ring, the polynomial ring denoted . This is the free -associative algebra on a single generator .
For a ring and , the set of -matrices with coefficients in is a ring under elementwise addition and matrix multiplication.
For a topological space, the set of continuous functions or with values in the real numbers or complex numbers is a ring under pointwise (points in ) addition and multiplication.
Just as an outlook and a suggestion for how to think geometrically of the objects appearing here, we mention the following.
The Gelfand duality theorem says that if one remembers certain extra structure on the rings of functions in example – called the structure of a C-star algebra, then this construction
is an equivalence of categories between that of topological spaces, and the opposite category of -algebras. Together with remark further below this provides a useful dual geometric way of thinking about the theory of modules.
From now on and throughout, we take to be a commutative ring.
A module over a ring is
an object Ab, hence an abelian group;
equipped with a morphism
in Ab; hence a function of the underlying sets that sends elements
and which is a bilinear function in that it satisfies
and
for all and ;
such that the diagram
commutes in Ab, which means that for all elements as before we have
such that the diagram
commutes, which means that on elements as above
The ring is naturally a module over itself, by regarding its multiplication map as a module action with .
More generally, for the -fold direct sum of the abelian group underlying is naturally a module over
The module action is componentwise:
Even more generally, for Set any set, the direct sum is an -module.
This is the free module (over ) on the set .
The set serves as the basis of a free module: a general element is a formal linear combination of elements of with coefficients in .
For special cases of the ring , the notion of -module is equivalent to other notions:
For the integers, an -module is equivalently just an abelian group.
For a field, an -module is equivalently a vector space over .
Every finitely-generated free -module is a free module, hence every finite dimensional vector space has a basis. For infinite dimensions this is true if the axiom of choice holds.
For a module and a set of elements, the linear span
(hence the completion of this set under addition in and multiplication by ) is a submodule of .
Consider example for the case that the module is , the ring itself, as in example . Then a submodule is equivalently (called) an ideal of .
Write Mod for the category or -modules and -linear maps between them.
For we have .
Let be a topological space and let
be the ring of continuous functions on with values in the complex numbers.
Given a complex vector bundle on , write for its set of continuous sections. Since for each point the fiber of over is a -module (by example ), is a -module.
Just as an outlook and a suggestion for how to think of modules geometrically, we mention the following.
The Serre-Swan theorem says that if is Hausdorff and compact with ring of functions – as in remark above – then is a projective -module and indeed there is an equivalence of categories between projective -modules and complex vector bundles over . (We introduce the notion of projective modules below in Derived categories and derived functors.)
We now discuss a bunch of properties of the category Mod which together will show that there is a reasonable concept of chain complexes of -modules, in generalization of how there is a good concept of chain complexes of abelian groups. In a more abstract category theoretical context than we invoke here, all of the following properties are summarized in the following statement.
Let be a commutative ring. Then is an abelian category.
But for the moment we ignore this further abstraction and just consider the following list of properties.
An object in a category which is both an initial object and a terminal object is called a zero object.
This means that is a zero object precisely if for every other object there is a unique morphism to the zero object as well as a unique morphism from the zero object.
Clearly the 0-module is a terminal object, since every morphism has to send all elements of to the unique element of , and every such morphism is a homomorphism. Also, 0 is an initial object because a morphism always exists and is unique, as it has to send the unique element of 0, which is the neutral element, to the neutral element of .
In a category with an initial object and pullbacks, the kernel of a morphism is the pullback along of the unique morphism
More explicitly, this characterizes the object as the object (unique up to unique isomorphism) that satisfies the following universal property:
for every object and every morphism such that is the zero morphism, there is a unique morphism such that .
In the category Ab of abelian groups, the kernel of a group homomorphism is the subgroup of on the set of elements of that are sent to the zero-element of .
More generally, for any ring, this is true in Mod: the kernel of a morphism of modules is the preimage of the zero-element at the level of the underlying sets, equipped with the unique sub-module structure on that set.
In a category with zero object, the cokernel of a morphism is the pushout in
More explicitly, this characterizes the object as the object (unique up to unique isomorphism) that satisfies the following universal property:
for every object and every morphism such that is the zero morphism, there is a unique morphism such that .
In the category Ab of abelian groups the cokernel of a morphism is the quotient group of by the image (of the underlying morphism of sets) of .
has all kernels. The kernel of a homomorphism is the set-theoretic preimage equipped with the induced -module structure.
has all cokernels. The cokernel of a homomorphism is the quotient abelian group
of by the image of .
The reader unfamiliar with the general concept of monomorphism and epimorphism may take the following to define these in Ab to be simply the injections and surjections.
preserves and reflects monomorphisms and epimorphisms:
A homomorphism in is a monomorphism / epimorphism precisely if is an injection / surjection.
Suppose that is a monomorphism, hence that is such that for all morphisms such that already . Let then and be the inclusion of submodules generated by a single element and , respectively. It follows that if then already and so is an injection. Conversely, if is an injection then its image is a submodule and it follows directly that is a monomorphism.
Suppose now that is an epimorphism and hence that is such that for all morphisms such that already . Let then be the natural projection. and let be the zero morphism. Since by construction and we have that , which means that and hence that and so that is surjective. The other direction is evident on elements.
For two modules, define on the hom set the structure of an abelian group whose addition is given by argumentwise addition in : .
With def. composition of morphisms
is a bilinear map, hence is equivalently a morphism
out of the tensor product of abelian groups.
This makes into an Ab-enriched category.
Linearity of composition in the second argument is immediate from the pointwise definition of the abelian group structure on morphisms. Linearity of the composition in the first argument comes down to linearity of the second module homomorphism.
In fact is even a closed category, but this we do not need for showing that it is abelian.
Prop. and prop. together say that:
is an pre-additive category.
has all products and coproducts, being direct products and direct sums.
The products are given by cartesian product of the underlying sets with componentwise addition and -action.
The direct sum is the subobject of the product consisting of tuples of elements such that only finitely many are non-zero.
The defining universal properties are directly checked. Notice that the direct product consists of arbitrary tuples because it needs to have a projection map
to each of the modules in the product, reproducing all of a possibly infinite number of non-trivial maps . On the other hand, the direct sum just needs to contain all the modules in the sum
and since, being a module, it needs to be closed only under addition of finitely many elements, so it consists only of linear combinations of the elements in the , hence of finite formal sums of these.
Together cor. and prop. say that:
is an additive category.
In
every monomorphism is the kernel of its cokernel;
every epimorphism is the cokernel of its kernel.
Using prop. this is directly checked on the underlying sets: given a monomorphism , its cokernel is , The kernel of that morphism is evidently .
Now cor. and prop. imply theorem , by definition.
Now we finally have all the ingredients to talk about chain complexes of -modules. The following definitions are the direct analogs of the definitions of chain complexes of abelian groups in Simplicial and singular homology above.
For a chain complex and
the morphisms are called the differentials or boundary maps;
for the elements in the kernel
of are called the -cycles
and for we say that every 0-chain is a 0-cycle
(equivalently we declare that ).
the elements in the image
of are called the -boundaries;
Notice that due to we have canonical inclusions
the cokernel
is called the degree- chain homology of .
A chain map is a collection of morphism in such that all the diagrams
commute, hence such that all the equations
hold.
For a chain map, it respects boundaries and cycles, so that for all it restricts to a morphism
and
In particular it also respects chain homology
Conversely this means that taking chain homology is a functor
from the category of chain complexes in to itself.
This establishes the basic objects that we are concerned with in the following. But as before, we are not so much interested in chain complexes up to chain map isomorphism, rather, we are interested in them up to a notion of homotopy equivalence. This we begin to study in the next section Homology exact sequences and homotopy fiber sequences. But in order to formulate that neatly, it is useful to have the tensor product of chain complexes. We close this section with introducing that notion.
For write for the chain complex whose component in degree is given by the direct sum
over all tensor products of components whose degrees sum to , and whose differential is given on elements of homogeneous degree by
(square as tensor product of interval with itself)
For some ring, let be the chain complex given by
where .
This is the normalized chain complex of the simplicial chain complex of the standard simplicial interval, the 1-simplex , which means: we may think of
as the -linear span of two basis elements labelled “” and “”, to be thought of as the two 0-chains on the endpoints of the interval. Similarly we may think of
as the free -module on the single basis element which is the unique non-degenerate 1-simplex in .
Accordingly, the differential is the oriented boundary map of the interval, taking this basis element to
and hence a general element for some to
We now write out in full details the tensor product of chain complexes of with itself, according to def. :
By definition and using the above choice of basis element, this is in low degree given as follows:
where in the last line we express a general element as a linear combination of the canonical basis elements which are obtained as tensor products of the previous basis elements. Notice that by the definition of tensor product of modules we have relations like
etc.
Similarly then, in degree-1 the tensor product chain complex is
And finally in degree 2 it is
All other contributions that are potentially present in vanish (are the 0-module) because all higher terms in are.
The tensor product basis elements appearing in the above expressions have a clear geometric interpretation: we can label a square with them as follows
This diagram indicates a cellular square and identifies its canonical singular chains with the elements of . The arrows indicate the orientation. For instance the fact that
says that the oriented boundary of the bottom morphism is the bottom right element (its target) minus the bottom left element (its source), as indicated. Here we used that the differential of a degree-0 element in is 0, and hence so is any tensor product with it.
Similarly the oriented boundary of the square itself is computed to
which can be read as saying that the boundary is the evident boundary thought of as oriented by drawing it counterclockwise into the plane, so that the right arrow (which points up) contributes with a +1 prefactor, while the left arrow (which also points up) contributes with a -1 prefactor.
Equipped with the standard tensor product of chain complexes , def. the category of chain complexes is a monoidal category . The unit object is the chain complex concentrated in degree 0 on the tensor unit of .
We write for the category of unbounded chain complexes.
For any two objects, define a chain complex to have components
(the collection of degree- maps between the underlying graded modules) and whose differential is defined on homogeneously graded elements by
This defines a functor
The collection of cycles of the internal hom in degree 0 coincides with the external hom functor
The chain homology of the internal hom in degree 0 coincides with the homotopy classes of chain maps.
By Definition the 0-cycles in are collections of morphisms such that
This is precisely the condition for to be a chain map.
Similarly, the boundaries in degree 0 are precisely the collections of morphisms of the form
for a collection of maps . This are precisely the null homotopies.
The monoidal category is a closed monoidal category, the internal hom is the standard internal hom of chain complexes.
With the basic definition of the category of chain complexes in hand, we now consider the first application, which is as simple as it is of ubiquituous use in mathematics: long exact sequences in homology. This is the “abelianization”, in the sense of the discussion in 2) above, of what in homotopy theory are long exact sequences of homotopy groups. But both concepts, in turn, are just the shadow on homology groups/homotopy groups, respectively of homotopy fiber sequences of the underlying chain complexes/topological spaces themselves. Since these are even more useful, in particular in chapter III) below, we discuss below in 5) how to construct these using chain homotopy and mapping cones.
First we need the fundamental notion of exact sequences. As before, we fix some commutative ring throughout and consider the category of modules over , which we will abbreviate
An exact sequence in is a chain complex in with vanishing chain homology in each degree:
A short exact sequence is an exact sequence, def. of the form
One usually writes this just “” or even just “”.
A general exact sequence is sometimes called a long exact sequence, to distinguish from the special case of a short exact sequence.
Beware that there is a difference between being exact (at ) and being a “short exact sequence” in that is exact at , and . This is illustrated by the following proposition.
Explicitly, a sequence of morphisms
in is short exact, def. , precisely if
is a monomorphism,
is an epimorphism,
and the image of equals the kernel of (equivalently, the coimage of equals the cokernel of ).
The third condition is the definition of exactness at . So we need to show that the first two conditions are equivalent to exactness at and at .
This is easy to see by looking at elements when Mod, for some ring (and the general case can be reduced to this one using one of the embedding theorems):
The sequence being exact at
means, since the image of is just the element , that the kernel of consists of just this element. But since is a group homomorphism, this means equivalently that is an injection.
Dually, the sequence being exact at
means, since the kernel of is all of , that also the image of is all of , hence equivalently that is a surjection.
Let Mod Ab. For with let be the linear map/homomorphism of abelian groups which acts by the ordinary multiplication of integers by . This is clearly an injection. The cokernel of this morphism is the projection to the quotient group, which is the cyclic group . Hence we have a short exact sequence
A typical use of a long exact sequence, notably of the homology long exact sequence to be discussed, is that it allows to determine some of its entries in terms of others.
The characterization of short exact sequences in prop. is one example for this. Another is this:
Often it is useful to make the following strengthening of short exactness explicit.
A short exact sequence in is called split if either of the following equivalent conditions hold
There exists a section of , hence a homomorphism such that .
There exists a retract of , hence a homomorphism such that .
There exists an isomorphism of sequences with the sequence
given by the direct sum and its canonical injection/projection morphisms.
It is clear that the third condition implies the first two: take the section/retract to be given by the canonical injection/projection maps that come with a direct sum.
Conversely, suppose we have a retract of . Write for the composite. Notice that by this is an idempotent: , hence a projector.
Then every element can be decomposed as hence with and . Moreover this decomposition is unique since if while at the same time then . This shows that is a direct sum and that is the canonical inclusion of . By exactness it then follows that and hence that with the canonical inclusion and projection.
The implication that the second condition also implies the third is formally dual to this argument.
Moreover, of particular interest are exact sequences of chain complexes. We consider this concept in full beauty below in section 5). In order to motivate the discussion there we here content ourselves with the following quick definition, which already admits discussion of some of its rich consequences.
A sequence of chain maps of chain complexes
is a short exact sequence of chain complexes in if for each the component
Consider a short exact sequence of chain complexes as in def. . For , define a group homomorphism
called the th connecting homomorphism of the short exact sequence, by sending
where
is a cycle representing the given homology group ;
is any lift of that cycle to an element in , which exists because is a surjection (but which no longer needs to be a cycle itself);
is the -homology class of which is indeed in by exactness (since ) and indeed in since .
Def. is indeed well defined in that the given map is independent of the choice of lift involved and in that the group structure is respected.
To see that the construction is well-defined, let be another lift. Then and hence . This exhibits a homology-equivalence since .
To see that is a group homomorphism, let be a sum. Then is a lift and by linearity of we have .
Under chain homology the morphisms in the short exact sequence together with the connecting homomorphisms yield the homology long exact sequence
Consider first the exactness of .
It is clear that if then the image of is . Conversely, an element is in the kernel of if there is with . Since is surjective let be any lift, then but hence by exactness and so is in the image of .
It remains to see that
This follows by inspection of the formula in def. . We spell out the first one:
If is in the image of we have a lift with and so . Conversely, if for a given lift we have that this means there is such that . But then is another possible lift of for which and so is in the image of .
The connecting homomorphism of the long exact sequence in homology induced from short exact sequences of the form in example is called a Bockstein homomorphism.
We now discuss a deeper, more conceptual way of understanding the origin of long exact sequences in homology and the nature of connecting homomorphisms. This will give first occasion to see some actual homotopy theory of chain complexes at work, and hence serves also as a motivating example for the discussions to follow in chapter III).
For this we need the notion of chain homotopy, which is the abelianized analog of the notion of homotopy of continuous maps above in def. . We now first introduce this concept by straightforwardly mimicking the construction in def. with topological spaces replaced by chain complexes. Then we use chain homotopies to construct mapping cones of chain maps. Finally we explain how these refine the above long exact sequences in homology groups to homotopy cofiber sequences of the chain complexes themselves.
A chain homotopy is a homotopy in . We first give the explicit definition, the more abstract characterization is below in prop. .
It may be useful to illustrate this with the following graphics, which however is not a commuting diagram:
Instead, a way to encode chain homotopies by genuine diagrammatics is below in prop. , for which we introduce the interval object for chain complexes:
Let
be the normalized chain complex in of the simplicial chains on the simplicial 1-simplex:
This is the standard interval in chain complexes. Indeed it is manifestly the “abelianization” of the standard interval object in sSet/Top: the 1-simplex.
A chain homotopy is equivalently a commuting diagram
in , hence a genuine left homotopy with respect to the interval object in chain complexes.
For notational simplicity we discuss this in Ab.
Observe that is the chain complex
where the term is in degree 0: this is the free abelian group on the set of 0-simplices in . The other copy of is the free abelian group on the single non-degenerate edge in . (All other simplices of are degenerate and hence do not contribute to the normalized chain complex which we are discussing here.) The single nontrivial differential sends to , reflecting the fact that one of the vertices is the 0-boundary the other the 1-boundary of the single nontrivial edge.
It follows that the tensor product of chain complexes is
Therefore a chain map that restricted to the two copies of is and , respectively, is characterized by a collection of commuting diagrams
On the elements and in the top left this reduces to the chain map condition for and , respectively. On the element this is the equation for the chain homotopy
Let be two chain complexes.
Define the relation chain homotopic on by
Chain homotopy is an equivalence relation on .
This quotient is compatible with composition of chain maps.
Accordingly the following category exists:
Write for the category whose objects are those of , and whose morphisms are chain homotopy classes of chain maps:
This is usually called the (strong) homotopy category of chain complexes in .
Beware, as we will discuss in detail below in 8), that another category that would deserve to carry this name instead is called the derived category of . In the derived category one also quotients out chain homotopy, but one allows that first the domain of the two chain maps and is refined along a quasi-isomorphism.
A chain map in is called a quasi-isomorphism if for each the induced morphisms on chain homology groups
is an isomorphism.
Quasi-isomorphisms are also called, more descriptively, homology isomorphisms or -isomorphisms. See at homology localization for more on this.
With the homotopy theoretic notions of chain homotopy and quasi-isomorphism in hand, we can now give a deeper explanation of long exact sequences in homology. We first give now a heuristic discussion that means to serve as a guide through the constructions to follow. The reader wishing to skip this may directly jump ahead to definition .
While the notion of a short exact sequence of chain complexes is very useful for computations, it does not have invariant meaning if one considers chain complexes as objects in (abelian) homotopy theory, where one takes into account chain homotopies between chain maps and takes equivalence of chain complexes not to be given by isomorphism, but by quasi-isomorphism.
For if a chain map is the degreewise kernel of a chain map , then if is a quasi-isomorphism (for instance a projective resolution of ) then of course the composite chain map is in general far from being the degreewise kernel of . Hence the notion of degreewise kernels of chain maps and hence that of short exact sequences is not meaningful in the homotopy theory of chain complexes in (for instance: not in the derived category of ).
That short exact sequences of chain complexes nevertheless play an important role in homological algebra is due to what might be called a “technical coincidence”:
If is a short exact sequence of chain complexes, then the commuting square
is not only a pullback square in , exhibiting as the fiber of over , it is in fact also a homotopy pullback.
This means it is universal not just among commuting such squares, but also among such squares which commute possibly only up to a chain homotopy :
and with morphisms between such squares being maps correspondingly with further chain homotopies filling all diagrams in sight.
Equivalently, we have the formally dual result
If is a short exact sequence of chain complexes, then the commuting square
is not only a pushout square in , exhibiting as the cofiber of over , it is in fact also a homotopy pushout.
But a central difference between fibers/cofibers on the one hand and homotopy fibers/homotopy cofibers on the other is that while the (co)fiber of a (co)fiber is necessarily trivial, the homotopy (co)fiber of a homotopy (co)fiber is in general far from trivial: it is instead the looping or suspension of the codomain/domain of the original morphism: by the pasting law for homotopy pullbacks the pasting composite of successive homotopy cofibers of a given morphism looks like this:
here
is a specific representative of the homotopy cofiber of called the mapping cone of , whose construction comes with an explicit chain homotopy as indicated, hence is homology-equivalence to above, but is in general a “bigger” model of the homotopy cofiber;
etc. is the suspension of a chain complex of , hence the same chain complex but pushed up in degree by one.
In conclusion we get from every morphim of chain complexes a long homotopy cofiber sequence
And applying the chain homology functor to this yields the long exact sequence in chain homology which is traditionally said to be associated to the short exact sequence .
In conclusion this means that it is not really the passage to homology groups which “makes a short exact sequence become long”. It’s rather that passing to homology groups is a shadow of passing to chain complexes regarded up to quasi-isomorphism, and this is what makes every short exact sequence be realized as but a special presentation of a stage in a long homotopy fiber sequence.
We give a precise account of this story in the next section.
We have seen in 4) the long exact sequence in homology implied by a short exact sequence of chain complexes, constructed by an elementary if somewhat un-illuminating formula for the connecting homomorphism. We ended 4) by sketching how this formula arises as the shadow under the homology functor of a homotopy fiber sequence of chain complexes, constructed using mapping cones. This we now discuss in precise detail.
In the following we repeatedly mention that certain chain complexes are colimits of certain diagrams of chain complexes. The reader unfamiliar with colimits may simply ignore them and regard the given chain complex as arising by definition. However, even a vague intuitive understanding of the indicated colimits as formalizations of “gluing” of chain complexes along certain maps should help to motivate why these definitions are what they are. The reader unhappy even with this can jump ahead to prop. and take this and the following propositions up to and including prop. as definitions.
The notion of a mapping cone that we introduce now is something that makes sense whenever
there is a notion of cylinder object, such as the topological cylinder over a topological space, or the chain complex cylinder of a chain complex from def. .
there is a way to glue objects along maps between them, a notion of colimit.
For a morphism in a category with cylinder objects , the mapping cone or homotopy cofiber of is the colimit in the following diagram
in using any cylinder object for .
Heuristically this says that is the object obtained by
forming the cylinder over ;
gluing to one end of that the object as specified by the map .
shrinking the other end of the cylinder to the point.
Heuristically it is clear that this way every cycle in that happens to be in the image of can be “continuously” translated in the cylinder-direction, keeping it constant in , to the other end of the cylinder, where it becomes the point. This means that every homotopy group of in the image of vanishes in the mapping cone. Hence in the mapping cone the image of under in is removed up to homotopy. This makes it clear how is a homotopy-version of the cokernel of . And therefore the name “mapping cone”.
Another interpretation of the mapping cone is just as important:
A morphism out of a cylinder object is a left homotopy between its restrictions and to the cylinder boundaries
Therefore prop. says that the mapping cone is the universal object with a morphism from and a left homotopy from to the zero morphism.
The interested reader can find more on the conceptual background of this construction at factorization lemma and at homotopy pullback.
This colimit, in turn, may be computed in two stages by two consecutive pushouts in , and in two ways by the following pasting diagram:
Here every square is a pushout, (and so by the pasting law is every rectangular pasting composite).
This now is a basic fact in ordinary category theory. The pushouts appearing here go by the following names:
The pushout
defines the cone over (with respect to the chosen cylinder object): the result of taking the cylinder over and identifying one -shaped end with the point.
The pushout
defines the mapping cylinder of , the result of identifying one end of the cylinder over with , using as the gluing map.
The pushout
defines the mapping cone of : the result of forming the cyclinder over and then identifying one end with the point and the other with , via .
As in remark all these step have evident heuristic geometric interpretations:
is obtained from the cylinder over by contracting one end of the cylinder to the point;
is obtained from the cylinder over by gluing to one end of the cylinder, as specified by the map ;
We discuss now this general construction of the mapping cone for a chain map between chain complexes. The end result is prop. below, reproducing the classical formula for the mapping cone.
Write for the chain complex concentrated on in degree 0
This may be understood as the normalized chain complex of chains of simplices on the terminal simplicial set , the 0-simplex.
Let be given by
Denote by
the chain map which in degree 0 is the canonical inclusion into the second summand of a direct sum and by
correspondingly the canonical inclusion into the first summand.
This is the standard interval object in chain complexes.
It is in fact the normalized chain complex of chains on a simplicial set for the canonical simplicial interval, the 1-simplex:
The differential here expresses the alternating face map complex boundary operator, which in terms of the three non-degenerate basis elements is given by
We decompose the proof of this statement is a sequence of substatements.
For the tensor product of chain complexes
is a cylinder object of for the structure of a category of cofibrant objects on whose cofibrations are the monomorphisms and whose weak equivalences are the quasi-isomorphisms (the substructure of the standard injective model structure on chain complexes).
By the formula discussed at tensor product of chain complexes the components arise as the direct sum
and the differential picks up a sign when passed past the degree-1 term :
The two boundary inclusions of into the cylinder are given in terms of def. by
and
which in components is the inclusion of the second or first direct summand, respectively
One part of definition now reads:
For a chain map, the mapping cylinder is the pushout
The colimits in a category of chain complexes are computed in the underlying presheaf category of towers in . There they are computed degreewise in (since limits of presheaves are computed objectwise). Here the statement is evident:
the pushout identifies one direct summand with along and so where previously a appeared on the diagonl, there is now .
The last part of definition now reads:
The components of the mapping cone are
with differential given by
and hence in matrix calculus by
As before the pushout is computed degreewise. This identifies the remaining unshifted copy of with 0.
For a chain map, the canonical inclusion of into the mapping cone of is given in components
by the canonical inclusion of a summand into a direct sum.
This follows by starting with remark and then following these inclusions through the formation of the two colimits as discussed above.
Using these mapping cones of chain maps, we now explain how the long exact sequences of homology groups, prop. , are a shadow under homology of genuine homotopy cofiber sequences of the chain complexes themselves.
Let be a chain map and write for its mapping cone as explicitly given in prop. .
Write for the suspension of a chain complex of . Write
for the chain map which in components
is given, via prop. , by the canonical projection out of a direct sum
This defines the mapping cone construction on chain complex. Its definition as a universal left homotopy should make the following proposition at least plausible, which we cannot prove yet at this point, but which we state nevertheless to highlight the meaning of the mapping cone construction. The tools for the proof of propositions like this are discussed further below in 7) Derived categories and derived functors.
The chain map represents the homotopy cofiber of the canonical map .
By prop. and def. the sequence
is a short exact sequence of chain complexes (since it is so degreewise, in fact degreewise it is even a split exact sequence, def. ). In particular we have a cofiber pushout diagram
Now, in the injective model structure on chain complexes all chain complexes are cofibrant objects and an inclusion such as is a cofibration. By the detailed discussion at homotopy limit this means that the ordinary colimit here is in fact a homotopy colimit, hence exhibits as the homotopy cofiber of .
Accordingly one says:
For a chain map, there is a homotopy cofiber sequence of the form
In order to compare this to the discussion of connecting homomorphisms, we now turn attention to the case that happens to be a monomorphism. Notice that this we can always assume, up to quasi-isomorphism, for instance by prolonging by the map into its mapping cylinder
By the axioms on an abelian category in this case we have a short exact sequence
of chain complexes. The following discussion revolves around the fact that now as well as are both models for the homotopy cofiber of .
Let
be a short exact sequence of chain complexes.
The collection of linear maps
constitutes a chain map
This is a quasi-isomorphism. The inverse of is given by sending a representing cycle to
where is any choice of lift through and where is the formula expressing the connecting homomorphism in terms of elements, as discussed at Connecting homomorphism – In terms of elements.
Finally, the morphism is eqivalent in the homotopy category (the derived category) to the zigzag
To see that defines a chain map recall the differential from prop. , which acts by
and use that is in the kernel of by exactness, hence
It is immediate to see that we have a commuting diagram of the form
since the composite morphism is the inclusion of followed by the bottom morphism on .
Abstractly, this already implies that is a quasi-isomorphism, for this diagram gives a morphism of cocones under the diagram defining in prop. and by the above both of these cocones are homotopy-colimiting.
But in checking the claimed inverse of the induced map on homology groups, we verify this also explicity:
We first determine those cycles which lift a cycle . By lemma a lift of chains is any pair of the form where is a lift of through . So has to be found such that this pair is a cycle. By prop. the differential acts on it by
and so the condition is that
(which implies due to the fact that is assumed to be an inclusion, hence that is the restriction of to elements in ).
This condition clearly has a unique solution for every lift and a lift always exists since is surjective, by assumption that we have a short exact sequence of chain complexes. This shows that is surjective.
To see that it is also injective we need to show that if a cycle maps to a cycle that is trivial in in that there is with , then also the original cycle was trivial in homology, in that there is with
For that let be a lift of through , which exists again by surjectivity of . Observe that
by assumption on and , and hence that is in by exactness.
Hence trivializes the given cocycle:
Let
be a short exact sequence of chain complexes.
Then the chain homology functor
sends the homotopy cofiber sequence of , cor. , to the long exact sequence in homology induced by the given short exact sequence, hence to
where is the th connecting homomorphism.
By lemma the homotopy cofiber sequence is equivalen to the zigzag
Observe that
It is therefore sufficient to check that
equals the connecting homomorphism induced by the short exact sequence.
By prop. the inverse of the vertical map is given by choosing lifts and forming the corresponding element given by the connecting homomorphism. By prop. the horizontal map is just the projection, and hence the assignment is of the form
So in total the image of the zig-zag under homology sends
By the discussion there, this is indeed the action of the connecting homomorphism.
In summary, the above says that for every chain map we obtain maps
which form a homotopy fiber sequence and such that this sequence continues by forming suspensions, hence for all we have
To amplify this quasi-cyclic behaviour one sometimes depicts the situation as follows:
and hence speaks of a “triangle”, or distinguished triangle or mapping cone triangle of .
Due to these “triangles” one calls the homotopy category of chain complexes localized at the quasi-isomorphisms, hence the derived category which we discuss below in 8), a triangulated category.
We have seen in the discussion of the connecting homomorphism in the homology long exact sequence in 4) above that given an exact sequence of chain complexes – hence in particular a chain complex of chain complexes – there are interesting ways to relate elements on the far right to elements on the far left in lower degree. In 5) we had given the conceptual explanation of this phenomenon in terms of long homotopy fiber sequences. But often it is just computationally useful to be able to efficiently establish and compute these “long diagram chase”-relations, independently of a homotopy-theoretic interpretation. Such computational tools we discuss here.
A chain complex of chain complex is called a double complex and so we first introduce this elementary notion and the corresponding notion notion of total complex. (Total complexes are similarly elementary to define but will turn out to play a deeper role as models for homotopy colimits, this we indicate further below in chapter V)).
There is a host of classical diagram-chasing lemmas that relate far-away entries in double complexes that enjoy suitable exactness properties. These go by names such as the snake lemma or the 3x3 lemma. The underlying mechanism of all these lemmas is made most transparent in the salamander lemma. This is fairly trivial to establish, and the notions it induces allow quick transparent proofs of all the other diagram-chasing lemmas.
The discussion to go here is kept at salamander lemma. See there.
We have seen in section II) that the most interesting properties of the category of chain complexes is all secretly controled by the phenomenon of chain homotopy and quasi-isomorphism. Strictly speaking these two phenomena point beyond plain category theory to the richer context of general abstract homotopy theory. Here we discuss properties of the category of chain complexes from this genuine homotopy-theoretic point of view. The result of passing the category of chain complexes to genuine homotopy theory is called the derived category (of the underlying abelian category , say of modules) and we start in 7) with a motivation of the phenomenon of this “homotopy derivation” and the discussion of the necessary resolutions of chain complexes. This naturally gives rise to the general notion of derived functors which we discuss in 8). Examples of these are ubiquituous in homological algebra, but as in ordinary enriched category theory two stand out as being of more fundamental importance, the derived functor “Ext” of the hom-functor and the derived functor “Tor” of the tensor product functor. Their properties and uses we discuss in 9).
We now come back to the category of def. , the “homotopy category of chain complexes” in which chain-homotopic chain maps are identified. This would seem to be the right context to study the homotopy theory of chain complexes, but one finds that there are still chain maps which ought to be identified in homotopy theory, but which are still not identified in . This is our motivating example below.
We discuss then how this problem is fixed by allowing to first “resolve” chain complexes quasi-isomorphically by “good representatives” called projective resolutions or injective resolutions. Many of the computations in the following sections – and in homological algebra in general – come down to operating on such resolutions. We end this section by prop. below, which shows that the above problem indeed goes away when allowing chain complexes to be resolved.
In the next section, 8), we discuss how this process of forming resolutions functorially extends to the whole category of modules.
So we start here with this simple example that shows the problem with bare chain homotopies and indicates how these have to be resolved:
In for Ab consider the chain map
The codomain of this map is an exact sequence, hence is quasi-isomorphic to the 0-chain complex. Thereofore in homotopy theory it should behave entirely as the 0-complex itself. In particular, every chain map to it should be chain homotopic to the zero morphism (have a null homotopy).
But the above chain map is chain homotopic precisely only to itself. This is because the degree-0 component of any chain homotopy out of this has to be a homomorphism of abelian groups , and this must be the 0-morphism, because is a free group, but is not.
This points to the problem: the components of the domain chain complex are not free enough to admit sufficiently many maps out of it.
Consider therefore a free resolution of the above domain complex by the quasi-isomorphism
where now the domain complex consists entirely of free groups. The composite of this with the original chain map is now
This is the corresponding resolution of the original chain map. And this indeed has a null homotopy:
So resolving the domain by a sufficiently free complex makes otherwise missing chain homotopies exist. Below in lemma we discuss the general theory behind the kind of situation of this example. But to get there we first need some basic notions and facts.
Notably, in general it is awkward to insist on actual free resolutions. But it is easy to see, and this we discuss now, that essentially just as well is a resolution by modules which are direct summands of free modules.
An object of a category is a projective object if it has the left lifting property against epimorphisms.
This means that is projective if for any morphism and any epimorphism , factors through by some morphism .
An equivalent way to say this is that:
An object is projective precisely if the hom-functor preserves epimorphisms.
The point of this lifting property will become clear when we discuss the construction of projective resolutions a bit further below: they are built by applying this property degreewise to obtain suitable chain maps.
We will be interested in projective objects in the category Mod: projective modules. Before we come to that, notice the following example (which the reader may on first sight feel is pedantic and irrelevant, but for the following it is actually good to make this explicit).
In the category Set of sets the following are equivalent
every object is projective;
the axiom of choice holds.
We will assume here throughout the axiom of choice in Set, as usual. The point of the above example, however, is that one could just as well replace Set by another “base topos” which will behave essentially precisely like Set, but in general will not validate the axiom of choice. Homological algebra in such a more general context is the theory of complexes of abelian sheaves/sheaves of abelian groups and ultimately the theory of abelian sheaf cohomology.
This is a major aspect of homological algebra. While we will not discuss this further here in this introduction, the reader might enjoy keeping in mind that all of the following discussion of resolutions of -modules goes through in this wider context of sheaves of modules except for subtleties related to the (partial) failure of example for the category of sheaves.
We now characterize projective modules.
Assuming the axiom of choice, a free module is projective.
Explicitly: if and is the free module on , then a module homomorphism is specified equivalently by a function from to the underlying set of , which can be thought of as specifying the images of the unit elements in of the copies of .
Accordingly then for an epimorphism, the underlying function is an epimorphism, and the axiom of choice in Set says that we have all lifts in
By adjunction these are equivalently lifts of module homomorphisms
If is a direct summand of a free module, hence if there is and such that
then is a projective module.
Let be a surjective homomorphism of modules and a homomorphism. We need to show that there is a lift in
By definition of direct sum we can factor the identity on as
Since is free by assumption, and hence projective by lemma , there is a lift in
Hence is a lift of .
An -module is projective precisely if it is the direct summand of a free module.
By lemma if is a direct summand then it is projective. So we need to show the converse.
Let be the free module on the set underlying , hence the direct sum
There is a canonical module homomorphism
given by sending the unit of the copy of in the direct sum labeled by to .
(Abstractly this is the counit of the free/forgetful-adjunction .)
This is clearly an epimorphism. Thefore if is projective, there is a section of . This exhibits as a direct summand of .
We discuss next how to build resolutions of chain complexes by projective modules. But before we come to that it is useful to also introduce the dual notion. So far we have concentrated on chain complexes with degrees in the natural numbers: non-negative degrees. For a discussion of resolutions we need a more degree-symmetric perspective, which of course is straightforward to obtain.
A cochain complex in is a sequence of morphism
in such that . A homomorphism of cochain complexes is a collection of morphisms such that for all .
We write for the category of cochain complexes.
Let be a fixed module and a chain complex. Then applying degreewise the hom-functor out of the components of into yields a cochain complex in Ab:
In example let Mod Ab, let and let be the singular simplicial complex of a topological space . Write
Then is called the singular cohomology of .
Example is just a special case of the internal hom of def. : we may regard cochain complexes in non-negative degree equivalently as chain complexes in positive degree.
Accordingly we say for a cochain complex that
an element in is an -cochain
an element in is an -coboundary
al element in is an -cocycle.
But equivalently we may regard a cochain in degree as a chain in degree and so forth. And this is the perspective used in all of the following.
The role of projective objects, def. , for chain complexes is played, dually, by injective objects for cochain complexes:
An object a category is injective if all diagrams of the form
with a monomorphism admit an extension
Since we are interested in refining modules by projective or injective modules, we have the following terminology.
A category
has enough projectives if for every object there is a projective object equipped with an epimorphism ;
has enough injectives if for every object there is an injective object equipped with a monomorphism .
We have essentially already seen the following statement.
Assuming the axiom of choice, the category Mod has enough projectives.
Let be the free module on the set underlying . By lemma this is a projective module.
The canonical morphism
is clearly a surjection, hence an epimorphism in Mod.
We now show that similarly has enough injectives. This is a little bit more work and hence we proceed with a few preparatory statements.
The following basic statement of algebra we cite here without proof (but see at injective object for details).
Assuming the axiom of choice, an abelian group is injective as a -module precisely if it is a divisible group, in that for all integers we have .
By prop. the following abelian groups are injective in Ab.
The group of rational numbers is injective in Ab, as is the additive group of real numbers and generally that underlying any field. The additive group underlying any vector space is injective. The quotient of any injective group by any other group is injective.
Not injective in Ab are the cyclic groups .
Assuming the axiom of choice, the category Mod Ab has enough injectives.
By prop. an abelian group is an injective -module precisely if it is a divisible group. So we need to show that every abelian group is a subgroup of a divisible group.
To start with, notice that the group of rational numbers is divisible and hence the canonical embedding shows that the additive group of integers embeds into an injective -module.
Now by the discussion at projective module every abelian group receives an epimorphism from a free abelian group, hence is the quotient group of a direct sum of copies of . Accordingly it embeds into a quotient of a direct sum of copies of .
Here is divisible because the direct sum of divisible groups is again divisible, and also the quotient group of a divisible groups is again divisble. So this exhibits an embedding of any into a divisible abelian group, hence into an injective -module.
Assuming the axiom of choice, for a ring, the category Mod has enough injectives.
The proof uses the following lemma.
Write for the forgetful functor that forgets the -module structure on a module and just remembers the underlying abelian group .
The functor has a right adjoint
given by sending an abelian group to the abelian group
equipped with the -module struture by which for an element is sent to the element given by
This is called the coextension of scalars along the ring homomorphism .
The unit of the adjunction
is the -module homomorphism
given on by
Let . We need to find a monomorphism such that is an injective -module.
By prop. there exists a monomorphism
of the underlying abelian group into an injective abelian group .
Now consider the -adjunct
of , hence the composite
with and from lemma . On the underlying abelian groups this is
Hence this is monomorphism. Therefore it is now sufficient to see that is an injective -module.
This follows from the existence of the adjunction isomorphism given by lemma
natural in and from the injectivity of .
Now we can state the main definition of this section and discuss its central properties.
For an object, an injective resolution of is a cochain complex (in non-negative degree) equipped with a quasi-isomorphism
such that is an injective object for all .
In components the quasi-isomorphism of def. is a chain map of the form
Since the top complex is concentrated in degree 0, this being a quasi-isomorphism happens to be equivalent to the sequence
being an exact sequence. In this form one often finds the definition of injective resolution in the literature.
For an object, a projective resolution of is a chain complex (in non-negative degree) equipped with a quasi-isomorphism
such that is a projective object for all .
In components the quasi-isomorphism of def. is a chain map of the form
Since the bottom complex is concentrated in degree 0, this being a quasi-isomorphism happens to be equivalent to the sequence
being an exact sequence. In this form one often finds the definition of projective resolution in the literature.
We first discuss the existence of injective/projective resolutions, and then the functoriality of their constructions.
Let be an abelian category with enough injectives, such as our Mod for some ring .
Then every object has an injective resolution, def. .
Let be the given object. By remark we need to construct an exact sequence of the form
such that all the are injective objects.
This we now construct by induction on the degree .
In the first step, by the assumption of enough injectives we find an injective object and a monomorphism
hence an exact sequence
Assume then by induction hypothesis that for an exact sequence
has been constructed, where all the are injective objects. Forming the cokernel of yields the short exact sequence
By the assumption that there are enough injectives in we may now again find a monomorphism into an injective object . This being a monomorphism means that
is exact in the middle term. Therefore we now have an exact sequence
which completes the induction step.
The following proposition is formally dual to prop. .
Let be an abelian category with enough projectives (such as Mod for some ring ).
Then every object has a projective resolution, def. .
Let be the given object. By remark we need to construct an exact sequence of the form
such that all the are projective objects.
This we we now construct by induction on the degree .
In the first step, by the assumption of enough projectives we find a projective object and an epimorphism
hence an exact sequence
Assume then by induction hypothesis that for an exact sequence
has been constructed, where all the are projective objects. Forming the kernel of yields the short exact sequence
By the assumption that there are enough projectives in we may now again find an epimorphism out of a projective object . This being an epimorphism means that
is exact in the middle term. Therefore we now have an exact sequence
which completes the induction step.
To conclude this section we now show that all this work indeed serves to solve the problem indicated above in example .
Let be a chain map of cochain complexes in non-negative degree, out of an exact complex to a degreewise injective complex . Then there is a null homotopy
By definition of chain homotopy we need to construct a sequence of morphisms such that
for all . We now construct this by induction over .
It is convenient to start at , take and . Then the above condition holds for .
Then in the induction step assume that for given we have constructed satisfying the above condition for
First define now
and observe that by induction hypothesis
This means that factors as
where the first map is the projection to the quotient.
Observe then that by exactness of the morphism is a monomorphism. Together this gives us a diagram of the form
where the morphism may be found due to the defining right lifting property of the injective object against the top monomorphism.
Observing that the commutativity of this diagram is the chain homotopy condition involving and , this completes the induction step.
The formally dual statement of prop is the following.
Let be a chain map of chain complexes in non-negative degree, into an exact complex from a degreewise projective complex . Then there is a null homotopy
Hence we have seen now that injective and projective resolutions of chain complexes serve to make chain homotopy interact well with quasi-isomorphism. In the next section we show that this construction lifts from single chain complexes to chain maps between chain complexes and in fact to the whole category of chain complexes. The resulting “resolved” category of chain complexes is the derived category, the true home of the abelian homotopy theory of chain complexes.
In the previous section we have seen that every object admits an injective resolution and a projective resolution. Here we lift this construction to morphisms and then to the whole category of chain complexes, up to chain homotopy.
The following proposition says that, when injectively resolving objects, the morphisms between these objects lift to the resolutions, and the following one, prop. , says that this lift is unique up to chain homotopy.
Let be a morphism in . Let
be an injective resolution of and
any monomorphism that is a quasi-isomorphism (possibly but not necessarily an injective resolution). Then there is a chain map giving a commuting diagram
By definition of chain map we need to construct morphisms such that for all the diagrams
commute (the defining condition on a chain map) and such that the diagram
commutes in (which makes the full diagram in commute).
We construct these by induction.
To start the induction, the morphism in the last diagram above can be found by the defining right lifting property of the injective object against the monomorphism .
Assume then that for some component maps have been obtained such that for all . In order to construct consider the following diagram, which we will describe/construct stepwise from left to right:
Here the morphism on the left is given by induction assumption and we define the diagonal morphism to be the composite
Observe then that by the chain map property of the we have
and therefore factors through via some as indicated in the middle of the above diagram. Finally the morphism on the top right is a monomorphism by the fact that is exact in positive degrees (being quasi-isomorphic to a complex concentrated in degree 0) and so a lift as shown on the far right of the diagram exists by the defining lifting property of the injective object .
The total outer diagram now commutes, being built from commuting sub-diagrams, and this is the required chain map property of This completes the induction step.
The morphism in prop. is the unique one up to chain homotopy making the given diagram commute.
Given two cochain maps making the diagram commute, a chain homotopy is equivalently a null homotopy of the difference, which sits in a square of the form
with the left vertical morphism being the zero morphism (and the bottom an injective resolution). Hence we have to show that in such a diagram is null-homotopic.
This we may reduce to the statement of prop. by considering instead of the induced chain map of augmented complexes
where the second square from the left commutes due to the commutativity of the original square of chain complexes in degree 0.
Since is a quasi-isomorphism, the top chain complex is exact, by remark . Moreover the bottom complex consists of injective objects from the second degree on (the former degree 0). Hence the induction in the proof of prop. implies the existence of a null homotopy
starting with and (notice that the proof prop. was formulated exactly this way), which works because . The de-augmentation of this is the desired null homotopy of .
We now discuss how the injective/projective resolutions constructed above are functorial if regarded in the homotopy category of chain complexes, def. . For definiteness, to be able to distinguish chain complexes from cochain complexes, introduce the following notation.
(the derived category)
Write as before
for the strong chain homotopy category of chain complexes, from def. .
Write similarly now
for the strong chain homotopy category of co-chain complexes.
Write furthermore
for the full subcategory on the degreewise projective chain complexes, and
for the full subcategory on the degreewise injective cochain complexes.
These subcategories – or any category equivalent to them – are called the (strictly bounded above/below) derived category of .
Often one defines the derived category by more general abstract means than we have introduced here, namely as the localization of the category of chain complexes at the quasi-isomorphims. If one does this, then the simple definition def. is instead a theorem. The interested reader can find more details and further pointers here.
If has enough injectives, def. , then there exists a functor
together with natural isomorphisms
and
By prop. every object has an injective resolution. Proposition says that for and two resolutions there is a morphism in and prop. says that this morphism is unique in . In particular it is therefore an isomorphism in (since the composite with the reverse lifted morphism, also being unique, has to be the identity).
So choose one such injective resolution for each .
Then for any morphism in , proposition again says that it can be lifted to a morphism between and and proposition says that there is an image in , unique for morphism making the given diagram commute.
This implies that this assignment of morphisms is functorial, since then also the composites are unique.
Dually we have:
If has enough projectives, def. , then there exists a functor
together with natural isomorphisms
and
For actually working with the derived category, the following statement is of central importance, which we record here without proof (which requires a bit of localization theory). It says that for computing hom-sets in the derived category, it is in fact sufficient to just resolve the domain or the codomain.
In conclusion we have found that there are resolution functors that embed in the homotopically correct context of resolved chain complexes with chain maps up to chain homotopy between them.
In the next section we discuss the general properties of this “homotopically correct context”: the derived category.
In the previous section we have seen how the entire category (= Mod) embeds into its derived category, the category of degreewise injective cochain complexes
or degreewise projective chain complexes
modulo chain homotopy. This construction of the derived category naturally gives rise to the following notion of derived functors.
For two abelian categories (e.g. Mod and Mod), a functor
is called an additive functor if
maps the zero object to the zero object, ;
given any two objects , there is an isomorphism , and this respects the inclusion and projection maps of the direct sum:
Given an additive functor , it canonically induces a functor
between categories of chain complexes (its “prolongation”) by applying it to each chain complex and to all the diagrams in the definition of a chain map. Similarly it preserves chain homotopies and hence it passes to the quotient given by the strong homotopy category of chain complexes
If and have enough projectives, then their derived categories are
and
etc. One wants to accordingly derive from a functor between these derived categories. It is immediate to achieve this on the domain category, there we can simply precompose and form
But the resulting composite lands in and in general does not factor through the inclusion .
In a more general abstract discussion than we present here, one finds that by applying a projective resolution functor on chain complexes, one can enforce this factorization. However, by definition of resolution, the resulting chain complex is quasi-isomorphic to the one obtained by the above composite.
This means that if one is only interested in the “weak chain homology type” of the chain complex in the image of a derived functor, then forming chain homology groups of the chain complexes in the images of the above composite gives the desired information. This is what def. and def. below do.
Let be two abelian categories, for instance Mod and Mod. Then a functor which preserves direct sums (and hence in particular the zero object) is called
a left exact functor if it preserves kernels;
a right exact functor if it preserves cokernels;
an exact functor if it is both left and right exact.
Here to “preserve kernels” means that for every morphism in we have an isomorphism on the left of the following commuting diagram
hence that both rows are exact. And dually for right exact functors.
We record the following immediate consequence of this definition (which in the literature is often taken to be the definition).
If is a left exact functor, then for every exact sequence of the form
also
is an exact sequence. Dually, if is a right exact functor, then for every exact sequence of the form
also
is an exact sequence.
If is exact then is a monomorphism by prop. . But then the statement that is exact at says precisely that is the kernel of . So if is left exact then by definition also is the kernel of and so is in particular also a monomorphism. Dually for right exact functors.
Proposition is clearly the motivation for the terminology in def. : a functor is left exact if it preserves short exact sequences to the left, and right exact if it preserves them to the right.
Now we can state the main two definitions of this section.
Let
be a left exact functor between abelian categories such that has enough injectives. For the th right derived functor of is the composite
where
is the injective resolution functor of theorem ;
is the -chain homology functor. Hence
Dually:
Let
be a right exact functor between abelian categories such that has enough projectives. For the th left derived functor of is the composite
where
is the projective resolution functor of theorem ;
is the -chain homology functor. Hence
The following proposition says that in degree 0 these derived functors coincide with the original functors.
Let a left exact functor, def. in the presence of enough injectives. Then for all there is a natural isomorphism
Dually, if is a right exact functor in the presence of enough projectives, then
We discuss the first statement, the second is formally dual.
By remark an injective resolution is equivalently an exact sequence of the form
If is left exact then it preserves this excact sequence by definition of left exactness, and hence
is an exact sequence. But this means that
The following immediate consequence of the definition is worth recording:
Let be an additive functor.
If is right exact and is a projective object, then
If is left exact and is a injective object, then
If is projective then the chain complex is already a projective resolution and hence by definition for . Dually if is an injective object.
For proving the basic property of derived functors below in prop. which continues these basis statements to higher degree, in a certain way, we need the following technical lemma.
For a short exact sequence in an abelian category with enough projectives, there exists a commuting diagram of chain complexes
where
and in addition
By prop. we can choose and . The task is now to construct the third resolution such as to obtain a short exact sequence of chain complexes, hence degreewise a short exact sequence, in the two row.
To construct this, let for each
be the direct sum and let the top horizontal morphisms be the canonical inclusion and projection maps of the direct sum.
Let then furthermore (in matrix calculus notation)
be given in the first component by the given composite
and in the second component we take
to be given by a lift in
which exists by the left lifting property of the projective object (since is a projective resolution) against the epimorphism of the short exact sequence.
In total this gives in degree 0
Let then the differentials of be given by
where the are constructed by induction as follows. Let be a lift in
which exists since is a projective object and is an epimorphism by being a projective resolution. Here we are using that by exactness the bottom morphism indeed factors through as indicated, because the definition of and the chain complex property of gives
Now in the induction step, assuming that has been been found satisfying the chain complex property, let be a lift in
which again exists since is projective. That the bottom morphism factors as indicated is the chain complex property of inside .
To see that the defines this way indeed squares to 0 notice that
This vanishes by the very commutativity of the above diagram.
This establishes such that the above diagram commutes and the bottom row is degreewise a short exact sequence, in fact a split exact sequence, by construction.
To see that is indeed a quasi-isomorphism, consider the homology long exact sequence associated to the short exact sequence of cochain complexes . In positive degrees it implies that the chain homology of indeed vanishes. In degree 0 it gives the short sequence sitting in a commuting diagram
where both rows are exact. That the middle vertical morphism is an isomorphism then follows by the five lemma.
The formally dual statement to lemma is the following.
For a short exact sequence in an abelian category with enough injectives, there exists a commuting diagram of cochain complexes
where
and in addition
The central general fact about derived functors to be discussed here is now the following.
Let be abelian categories and assume that has enough injectives.
Let be a left exact functor and let
be a short exact sequence in .
Then there is a long exact sequence of images of these objects under the right derived functors of def.
in .
By lemma we can find an injective resolution
of the given exact sequence which is itself again an exact sequence of cochain complexes.
Since is an injective object for all , its component sequences are indeed split exact sequences (see the discussion there). Splitness is preserved by any functor (and also since is additive it even preserves the direct sum structure that is chosen in the proof of lemma ) and so it follows that
is a again short exact sequence of cochain complexes, now in . Hence we have the corresponding homology long exact sequence from prop. :
By construction of the resolutions and by def. , this is equal to
Finally the equivalence of the first three terms with is given by prop. .
Prop. implies that one way to interpret is as a “measure for how a left exact functor fails to be an exact functor”. For, with any short exact sequence, this proposition gives the exact sequence
and hence is a short exact sequence itself precisely if .
Dually, if is right exact functor, then “measures how fails to be exact” for then
is an exact sequence and hence is a short exact sequence precisely if .
Notice that in fact we even have the following statement (following directly from the definition).
Because an exact functor preserves all exact sequences. If is a projective resolution then also is exact in all positive degrees, and hence . Dually for .
Conversely:
Let be a left or right exact additive functor. An object is called an -acyclic object if all positive-degree right/left derived functors of are zero on .
Acyclic objects are useful for computing derived functors on non-acyclic objects. More generally, we now discuss how the derived functor of an additive functor may also be computed not necessarily with genuine injective/projective resolutions, but with (just) “-injective”/“-projective resolutions”.
While projective resolutions in are sufficient for computing every left derived functor on and injective resolutions are sufficient for computing every right derived functor on , if one is interested just in a single functor then such resolutions may be more than necessary. A weaker kind of resolution which is still sufficient is then often more convenient for applications. These -projective resolutions and -injective resolutions, respectively, we discuss now. A special case of both are -acyclic resolutions.
Let be abelian categories and let be an additive functor.
Assume that is left exact. An additive full subcategory is called -injective (or: consisting of -injective objects) if
for every object there is a monomorphism into an object ;
for every short exact sequence in with also ;
for every short exact sequence in with also is a short exact sequence in .
And dually:
Assume that is right exact. An additive full subcategory is called -projective (or: consisting of -projective objects) if
for every object there is an epimorphism from an object ;
for every short exact sequence in with also ;
for every short exact sequence in with also is a short exact sequence in .
With the as above, we say:
For ,
an -injective resolution of is a cochain complex and a quasi-isomorphism
an -projective resolution of is a chain complex and a quasi-isomorphism
Let now have enough projectives / enough injectives, respectively, def. .
For an additive functor, let be the full subcategory on the -acyclic objects, def. . Then
if is left exact, then is a subcategory of -injective objects;
if is right exact, then is a subcategory of -projective objects.
Consider the case that is right exact. The other case works dually. Then the first condition of def. is satisfied because every injective object is an -acyclic object and by assumption there are enough of these.
For the second and third condition of def. use that there is the long exact sequence of derived functors prop.
For the second condition, by assumption on and and definition of -acyclic object we have and for and hence short exact sequences
which imply that for all , hence that is acyclic.
Similarly, the third condition is equivalent to .
The -projective/injective resolutions by acyclic objects as in example are called -acyclic resolutions.
Let be an abelian category with enough injectives. Let be an additive left exact functor with right derived functor , def. . Finally let be a subcategory of -injective objects, def. .
Consider the following collection of short exact sequences obtained from the long exact sequence :
and so on. Going by induction through this list and using the second condition in def. we have that all the are in . Then the third condition in def. says that all the sequences
are exact. But this means that
is exact, hence that is quasi-isomorphic to 0.
For an object with -injective resolution , def. , we have for each an isomorphism
between the th right derived functor, def. of evaluated on and the cochain cohomology of applied to the -injective resolution .
By prop. we can also find an injective resolution . By prop. there is a lift of the identity on to a chain map such that the diagram
commutes in . Therefore by the 2-out-of-3 property of quasi-isomorphisms it follows that is a quasi-isomorphism
Let be the mapping cone of and let be the canonical chain map into it. By the explicit formulas for mapping cones, we have that
there is an isomorphism ;
(because -injective objects are closed under direct sum). %I is injective but not F-injective, so this does not seem to follow%
The first implies that we have a homology exact sequence
Observe that with a quasi-isomorphism is quasi-isomorphic to 0. Therefore the second item above implies with lemma that also is quasi-isomorphic to 0. This finally means that the above homology exact sequences consists of exact pieces of the form
This concludes the discussion of the general definition and the general properties of derived functors that we will consider here. In the next section we discuss the two archetypical examples.
We introduce here the two archetypical examples of derived functors and discuss their basic properties. In the next chapter IV) The fundamental theorems we discuss how to use these derived functors for obtaining deeper statements.
Above we have seen the definition and basic general properties of derived functors obtained from left/right exact functors between abelian categories.
Of all functors, a most fundamental one is the hom-functor of a given category. For categories such as Mod considered here, it comes with its left adjoint, the tensor product functor, which is hence equally fundamentally important. Here we discuss the derived functors of these two basic functors in detail.
For simplicity – this here being an introduction – we will discuss various statements only over , hence for abelian groups. The main simplification that this leads to is the following.
Every subgroup of a free abelian group is itself a free group.
This is a classical fact going back to Dedekind, now known (in its generalization to not-necessarily abelian groups) as the Nielsen-Schreier theorem. For us it is interesting due to the following consequence
Assuming the axiom of choice, every abelian group admits a projective resolution, def. , concentrated in degree 0 and degree 1, hence a resolution which under remark corresponds to a short exact sequence
where and are projective, indeed free.
By the proof of prop. there is an epimorphism out of a free abelian group (take for instance , the free abelian group in the underlying set of ). By prop. the kernel of this epimorphism is itself a free group, and hence by prop. is itself projective. Take this kernel to be .
This fact drastically constrains the complexity of right derived functors on abelian groups:
Let be an additive functor which is left exact functor. Then its right derived functors vanish for all .
By prop. there is a projective resolution of any of the form . This implies the claim by def. .
The conclusion of prop. holds more generally over every ring which is a principal ideal domain. This includes in particular a field, in which case Vect. On the other hand, every -vector space is already projective itself, so that in this case the whole theory of right derived functors trivializes.
For an abelian category, such as Mod, the hom-sets naturally have the structure of an abelian group themselves. This means that the hom-functor of is
where is the opposite category of . This functor sends a morphism
to the linear map which sends a homomorphism to the composite homomorphism
In particular if we hold the first argument fixed on an object , then this yields a functor
and if we keep the second argument fixed on an object , then this yields a functor
This functor we have already seen above in example .
A very basic fact is the following.
The functor is a left exact functor, def. . In particular for every the functor is left exact, and for every the functor is left exact.
A kernel in the opposite category is equivalently a cokernel in . Hence if we regard instead as a contravariant functor from to Ab, then the statement that it is left exact means that (on top of preserving direct sums) it sends cokernels in to kernels in Ab.
We therefore have the corresponding right derived functor:
For given , write
for the right derived functor, def. , of the hom-functor in the first argument, according to prop. .
This is called the Ext-functor.
The basic property of the derived Hom-functor/Ext-functor is that it classifies group extensions by (suspensions of) . This we now discuss in detail, starting from a basic discussion of group extensions themselves.
The following definition essentially just repeats that of a short exact sequence above in def. , but now we consider it for a possibly nonabelian group and think of it slightly differently regarding these sequences up to homomorphisms as in def. below. Equivalently we may think of the following as a discussion of the classification of short exact sequences when the leftmost and rightmost component are held fixed.
Two consecutive homomorphisms of groups
are a short exact sequence if
is monomorphism,
an epimorphism
We say that such a short exact sequence exhibits as a group extension of by .
If factors through the center of we say that this is a central extension.
Sometimes in the literature one sees called an extension “of by ”. This is however in conflict with terms such as central extension, extension of principal bundles, etc, where the extension is always regarded of the base, by the fiber.
A homomorphism of extensions of a given by a given is a group homomorphism of this form which fits into a commuting diagram
By the short five lemma.
For and groups, write for the set of equivalence classes of extensions of by , as above and for for the central extensions. If and are both abelian, write
for the subset of abelian groups that are (necessarily central) extensions of by .
We discuss now the following two ways that the knows about such group extensions.
Central extensions of a possibly non-abelian group are classified by the degree-2 group cohomology of with coefficients in , and this in turn is equivalently computed by , where is the group ring of .
Abelian extensions of an abelian group are classified by . In fact, generally, in an abelian category extensions of by (in the sense of short exact sequences ) are classified by .
We first discuss now group cohomology:
Let be group and an abelian group (regarded as being equipped with the trivial -action).
Then a group 2-cocycle on with coefficients in is a function
such that for all it satisfies the equation
(called the 2-cocycle condition).
For two such cocycles, a coboundary between them is a function
such that for all the equation
holds in , where
is a 2-coboundary.
The degree-2 group cohomology is the set
of equivalence classes of group 2-cocycles modulo group coboundaries. This is itself naturally an abelian group under pointwise addition of cocycles in
where
The following says that in the computation of one may concentrate on nice representatives that are called normalized cocycles:
For a group 2-cocycle, we have for all that
The cocycle condition (4) evaluated on
says that
hence that
Similarly the 2-cocycle condition applied to
says that
hence that
By lemma it is sufficient to show that is cohomologous to a cocycle satisfying . Now given , let be given by
Then has the desired property, with (5):
The fundamental classification theorem is now the following. This does not yet involve the Ext-functor explicitly.
There is a natural equivalence
We prove this below as prop. . Here we first introduce stepwise the ingredients that go into the proof.
(central extension associated to group 2-cocycle)
Let be a group 2-cocycle. Choose to be a representative of the cohomology class by a normalized cocycle, def. , which can always be done by prop. .
Define a group
as follows.
Let the underlying set of be the cartesian product of the underlying sets of and . The group operation on this is given by
This defines indeed a group: the cocycle condition on gives precisely the associativity of the product on . Moreover, the construction extends to a homomorphism
Forming the product of three elements of bracketed to the left is, according to def. ,
Bracketing the same three elements to the right yields
The difference between the two expressions is read off to be precisely
where denotes the group cohomology differential of . Hence this vanishes precisely if is a group 2-cocycle, hence we have an associative product.
To see that it has inverses, notice that for all we have
and hence inverses in are given by
Therefore is indeed a group.
Using that is a normalized cocycle by assumption, we find that the inclusion
given by is a group homomorphism. Moreover, the projection on the underlying sets evidently yields a group homomorphism given by . The kernel of this is , and hence
is indeed a group extension. It is a central extension again using the assumption that is normalized :
To see that the construction is independent of the choice of coycle representing , let be another representative which differs by a coboundary with
We claim that then we have a homomorphism of central extensions (hence an isomorphism) of the form
To see this we check for all elements that
Hence the construction of indeed defines a function .
Assume the axiom of choice in the ambient foundations.
(2-cocycle extracted from central extension)
Given a central extension define a group 2-cocycle as follows.
Choose a section of the underlying sets (which exists by the axiom of choice and the fact that is by definition an epimorphism). Then define by
where on the right we are using that by the section-property of and the group homomorphism property of
and hence by the exactness of the extension the argument is in .
The construction of prop. indeed yields a 2-cocycle in group cohomology. It extends to a morphism
The cocycle condition to be checked is that
for all . Writing this out with def. yields
Here it is sufficient to observe that for every term also the inverse term appears.
To see that this is a well-defined map to we need to check that for a different choice of section, the corresponding cocycles differ by a group coboundary . Clearly this is obtained by setting
where we use that the right hand side is in since because both and are sections of , the image of the right hand under is the neutral element in .
The two morphisms of def. and def. exhibit an bijection
Let . Then by construction of there is a canonical section of the underlying function of sets given by . The cocycle induced by this section sends
which is , and hence this recovers the 2-cocycle that we started with.
This shows that and in particular that is a surjection. It is readily seen that the kernel of is trivial, and so it is an equivalence.
The central extension of an abelian group by an abelian group need not itself be abelian.
But from the above classification we can read off the condition for the extension to be central.
The central extension of an abelian group is itself abelian if the coresponding cocycle is symmetric, in that
for all .
With the general classification of group extensions in hand, we now turn back to the Ext-functor. First we discuss a choice of projective resolution that yields group cocycles.
For a group, the group ring is the ring
whose underlying abelian group is the free abelian group on the underlying set of ;
whose multiplication is given on basis elements by the group operation.
Write
for the homomorphism of abelian groups which forms the sum of -coefficients of the formal linear combinations that constitute the group ring
This is called the augmentation map.
For let
be the free module over the group ring on -tuples of elements of (hence is the free module on a single generator).
For let be given on basis elements by
where in the first summand we have the coefficient times the basis element in .
In particular
Write furthermore for the quotient module which is the cokernel of the inclusion of those elements for which one of the is the unit element.
The construction in def. defines chain complexes and of -modules. Moreover, with the augmentation map of def. these are projective resolutions
of equipped with the trivial -module structure in Mod.
The proof that we have indeed a chain complex is much like the proof of the existence of the alternating face map complex of a simplicial group, because writing
one finds that these satisfy the simplicial identities and that .
That the augmentation map is a quasi-isomorphism is equivalent, by remark , to the augmentation
being an exact sequence. In fact we show that it is a split exact sequence by constructing for the canonical chain map to the 0-complex a null homotopy . To that end, let
be given by sending to the single basis element in , and let for
be given on basis elements by
In the lowest degrees we have
because
and
because for all we have
For all remaining we find
by a lengthy but straightforward computation. This shows that every cycle is a boundary, hence that we have a resolution.
Finally, since the chain complex consists by construction degreewise of free modules hence of a projective modules, it is a projective resolution.
For an abelian group equipped with a linear -action and for , the degree- group cohomology of with coefficients in is equivalently given by
where on the right we canonically regard Mod.
By the free functor adjunction we have that
is the set of functions from -tuples of elements of to elements of . It is immediate to check that these are in the kernel of precisely if they are cocycles in the group cohomology (by comparison with the explicit formulas there) and that they are gorup cohomology coboundaries precisely if they are in the image of . This establishes the first equivalences.
Similarly one finds that is the sub-group of normalized cocycles. By the discussion at group cohomology these already support the entire group cohomology (every cocycle is comologous to a normalized one).
This finishes the discussion of the classification of central extensions of groups by .
Now we discuss the general statement that classifies extensions in , hence in particular abelian extension of abelian groups if Ab.
Given , an extension of by is a short exact sequence of the form
Two extensions and are called equivalent if there is a morphism in such that we have a commuting diagram
Write for the set of equivalence classes of extensions of by .
By the short five lemma a morphism as above is necessarily an isomorphism and hence we indeed have an equivalence relation.
If has enough projectives, define a function
from the group of extensions, def. , to the first Ext functor group as follows. Choose any projective resolution , which exists by prop. . Regard then as a resolution
of , by remark . By prop. there exists then a commuting diagram of the form
lifting the identity map on two a chain map between the two resolutions.
By the commutativity of the top square, the morphism is 1-cocycle in , hence defines an element in .
The construction of def. is indeed well defined in that it is independent of the choice of projective resolution as well as of the choice of chain map between the projective resolutions.
First consider the same projective resolution but another lift of the identity. By prop. any other choice fitting into a commuting diagram as above is related by a chain homotopy to .
The chain homotopy condition here says that
and hence that in we have that is a coboundary. Therefore for the given choice of resolution we have obtained a well-defined map
If moreover is another projective resolution, with respect to which we define such a map as above, then lifting the identity map on to a chain map between these resolutions in both directions, by prop. , establishes an isomorphism between the resulting maps, and hence the construction is independent also of the choice of resolution.
Define a function
as follows. For a projective resolution of and an element of the -group, let
be a representative. By the commutativity of the top square this restricts to a morphism
where now the left column is itself an extension of by the cokernel (because by exactness the kernel of is the image of so that the kernel of is zero). Form then the pushout of the horizontal map along the two vertical maps. This yields
Here the top right is indeed , by the pasting law for pushouts and using that the left vertical composite is the zero morphism. Moreover, the top right morphism is indeed a monomorphism as it is the pushout of a map of modules along an injection. Similarly the top right morphism is an epimorphism.
Hence is an element in which we assign to .
The construction of def. is indeed well defined in that it is independent of the choice of projective resolution as well as of the choice of representative of the -element.
The coproduct is equivalently
For a different representative of there is by construction a
Define from this a map between the two cokernels induced by the commuting diagram
By construction this respects the inclusion of . It also manifestly respects the projection to . Therefore this defines a morphism and hence by remark even an isomorphism of extensions.
The functions
from def. to def. are inverses of each other and hence exhibit a bijection between extensions of by and .
By straightforward unwinding of the definitions.
In one direction, starting with a and constructing the extension by pushout, the resulting pushout diagram
at the same time exhibits as the cocycle extracted from the extension .
Conversely, when starting with an extension then extracting a by a choice of projective resolution and constructing from that another extension by pushout, the universal property of the pushout yields a morphism of exensions, which by remark is an isomorphism of extensions, hence an equality in .
This concludes our discussion of the derived Hom-functor and its relation to extensions and group extensions in low degree. Of course also the higher -groups classify higher extensions, but this we will not discuss here. Instead we turn now to the left adjoint of Hom-functor, the functor that forms tensor product of modules.
We discuss now the construction and the basic properties of the derived functors of the following tensor product functors.
Let be a commutative ring. Above in def. we considered the tensor product of abelian groups, hence of -modules. This directly generalizes to a tensor product of -modules as follows.
For Mod two -modules, their tensor product of modules over
is defined to be the -module
whose underlying abelian group is the quotient of the free abelian group on , hence on the set of pairs , by the bilinearity relations (for all tuples of elements for which these expressions makes sense)
and
(as for tensor products of abelian groups)
and
whose -action is given by
We then have statements analog to those for tensor products of abelian groups. or instance as in prop. we have:
For Mod any module and for regarded as a module over itself, example , there is an isomorphism
given by sending
Let Mod be an -module. The operation of forming the tensor product of modules with extends to a functor
by sending a homomorphism of -modules to the homomorphism
given by
This is well-defined precisely by the fact that is a homomorphism of -modules by assumption.
Therefore we may consider its left derived functor, according to def. .
For and , write
for the left derived functor of the tensor product of modules-functor – the Tor-functor.
We could just as well consider deriving the tensor product functor in the second variable. Indeed both choices give the same result. We postpone the proof of this until we have developed the tool of spectral sequences below in 12). See prop. below.
The name “Tor” derives from the basic relation of this functor to torsion subgroups. This we discuss now.
An abelian group is called torsion if its elements are “nilpotent”, hence if all its elements have finite order.
For Ab and , write
for the -torsion subgroup consisting of all those elements whose -fold sum with themselves gives 0.
For , , for the cyclic group and for Ab Mod any abelian group, we have an isomorphism
For we have
For the first statement, the short exact sequence
constitutes a projective resolution (even a free resolution) of . Accordingly we have
Here in the last step we use that acts as
The second statement follows since is already free so that is a projective resolution.
For Mod, the functor respects direct sums.
Let Set and let be an -family of -modules. Observe that
if is a family of projective resolutions, then their degreewise direct sum is a projective resolution of .
the tensor product functor distributes over direct sums, by prop. ;
the chain homology functor preserves direct sums.
Using this we have
Let be a finite abelian group and any abelian group. Then is a torsion group. Specifically, is a direct sum of torsion subgroups of .
By a fundamental fact about finite abelian groups (see this theorem), is a direct sum of cyclic groups . By prop. respects this direct sum, so that
By prop. every direct summand on the right is a torsion group and hence so is the whole direct sum.
In fact this statement is true without assuming finiteness. The full statement is theorem below, which we come to after preparing a few more properties of .
One aspect here is that the order of and does not matter:
For Ab and there is a natural isomorphism
By prop. there is always a short exact sequence
exhibiting a projective resolution of any module . It follows that .
Let then be such a short resolution for . Then by the long exact sequence of a derived functor, prop. , this induces an exact sequence of the form
By prop. , since by construction and are already projective modules themselves this collapses to an exact sequence
To the last three terms we apply the natural symmetric braiding in isomorphism to get
This exhibits a morphism as the morphism induced on kernels from an isomorphism between two morphisms. Hence this is itself an isomorphism. (This is just by the universal property of the kernel, but one may also think of it as a simple application of the four lemma/five lemma.)
In order to understand more of theorem we need to understand the acyclic objects of the tensor product functor, def. . These are called the flat modules.
An -module is flat if tensoring with over as a functor from Mod to itself
is an exact functor, def. .
The condition in def. has the following immediate equivalent reformulations:
is flat precisely if is a left exact functor,
because tensoring with any module is generally already a right exact functor;
is flat precisely if sends monomorphisms (injections) to monomorphisms,
because for a right exact functor to also be left exact the only remaining condition is that it preserves the monomorphisms on the left of a short exact sequence;
is flat precisely if the degree-1 Tor-functor is zero,
because by remark is the obstruction to a right exact functor being left exact;
is flat precisely if all higher Tor functors are zero,
is flat precisely if is an acyclic object with respect to the tensor product functor;
because the Tor functor is symmetric in both arguments by prop. and by definition of acyclic object, def. .
A particularly simple kind of injection of -modules are the injections of finitely generated ideals into the ring , regarded as a module over itself, by example . According to remark being flat implies that also is a monomorphism. The following theorem says that this is indeed already sufficient to imply that preserves also all other monomorphisms.
An -module is flat already if for all inclusions of a finitely generated ideal into , regarded as a module over itself, the induced morphism
is an injection.
We will not prove this here. But this does imply the following explicit element-wise characterization of flat modules.
A module is flat precisely if for every finite linear combination of zero, with , there are elements and linear combinations
with such that for all we have linear combinations of 0 in
A finite set corresponds to the inclusion of a finitely generated ideal .
By theorem is flat precisely if is an injecton. This in turn is the case precisely if the only element of the tensor product that is 0 in is already 0 on .
Now by definition of tensor product of modules an element of is of the form for some . Under the inclusion this maps to the actual linear combination . This map is injective if whenever this linear combination is 0, already is 0.
But the latter is the case precisely if this is equal to a combination where all the are 0. This implies the claim.
By the same kind of reasoning as in the proof of prop. one finds:
A module is flat if and only if it is a filtered colimit of free modules.
Using this we can now show the following.
Let hence be a filtered diagram of modules. For each , we may find a projective resolution and in fact a free resolution . Since chain homology commutes with filtered colimits (this is discussed at chain homology - respect for filtered colimits), this means that
is still a quasi-isomorphism. Moreover, by Lazard's criterion, def. the degreewise filtered colimits of projective modules for each are flat modules. This means that is flat resolution of . By remark this means that it is a -acyclic resolution. Then by example and theorem it follows that
Now the tensor product of modules is a left adjoint functor (the right adjoint being the internal hom of modules) and so it commutes over the filtered colimit to yield, using again that chain homology commutes with filtered colimits,
Using this we now can now proof the generalization of prop. .
For Ab, is a torsion group which is a filtered colimit of direct sums of torsion subgroups of either or .
The group may be expressed as a filtered colimit
of all its finitely generated subgroups (this is discussed at Mod - Limits and colimits). Each of these is a direct sum of cyclic groups.
By prop. preserves these colimits. By prop. every summand is sent to a torsion subgroup (of either or ). Therefore by prop. is a filtered colimit of direct sums of torsion groups. This is itself a torsion group.
This concludes our discussion of the basic properties of the -functor. In the next chapter The fundamental theorems we see Ext and Tor put to work to yield deeper statements.
We have tried to indicate in the motivation chapter I) that homological algebra arises from homotopy theory by “abelianization”, a strict form of stabilization. Accordingly a central question is, how and to which extent this process respects basic universal constructions. This is what the “fundamental theorems” of homological algebra are about:
The Künneth theorem, discussed in 10) below, says how passing to singular homology commutes with taking products of spaces. The spectral sequence of a double complex describes how passing to homology commutes with taking homotopy colimits producing either total simplicial sets or total complexes. This we discuss in 12). The constructions and computation going into this involve the fundamentals of iterative relative homology, which is expressed by the spectral sequence of a filtered complex which we discuss in detail in 11).
There are more and tighter relation between homotopy theory and homological algebra, which however require a bit more background in simplicial homotopy theory. This we finally turn to in chapter V) below.
We discuss the following three theorems which put the Ext- and Tor-construction of the previous section 10) to use. All three are closely related, the first two are roughly dual to each other, the third is a generalization of the first:
We state these here first, as is traditional, in a version that is not the most general possible, but which is still convenient to use and as general as the standard applications require. (The fully general version requires the technology of spectral sequences, which we turn to below in the next section 12).) In this version these theorems all require an assumption on the base ring : that it is the ring of integers, or, more generally, that it is a principal ideal domain, for instance also a field or the polynomial ring with coefficients in a field. Or rather, they rely on the following consequence of this assumption on :
For a principal ideal domain, every submodule of a free module over is itself a free module.
A detailed proof of this fact can be found at Principal ideal domain - structure theory of modules.
Over a field an -module is a vector space and (assuming the axiom of choice) every vector space has a basis, hence is free on that basis.
Indeed, for all of the following three theorems the situation where is a field is special in that in this case an Ext- or Tor-correction term vanishes and instead of just a short exact sequence with such a term the theorems produce an isomorphism.
The following theorems relate homology/cohomology with basic coefficients to those with coefficients. To make this notion fully explicit:
Let be a chain complex which is degreewise a free module. Let be any module. Then we say that
the chain homology of with coefficients in is the chain homology
of the chain complex obtained degreewise by the tensor product of modules with ;
the cochain cohomology of with coefficients in in the cochain cohomology
of the cochain complex, example , obtained forming degreewise the hom-object into .
Since for each the module is free by assumption, hence a direct sum , since the tensor product of modules distributes over direct sums, prop. , and since is the tensor unit for the tensor product over , it follows that
Our archetypical and motivating example, introduced in section 2), is still the following:
For a topological space and the singular chain complex over , hence for the free module on the set of sincular k-simplices for each we have that
is the singular homology of with coefficients in ;
as in example , is the singular cohomology of with coefficients in .
Now the universal coefficient theorem below says, roughly, that the basic coefficient ring is already “universal” in that
homology with any other coefficients is determined by homology with basic coefficients corrected by a Tor-module;
cohomology with any other coefficient is determined by cohomology with basic coefficients corrected by an Ext-module.
After these preliminaries, we finally state and prove the theorems. So
let be a ring which is a principal ideal domain,
let be a chain complex of free modules over ,
let be any -module,
write for the tensor product of modules over .
(universal coefficient theorem in ordinary homology)
For each there is a short exact sequence
where on the right we have the first Tor-module, def. , of the chain homology with .
This means in particular that when the Tor-module vanishes, then there is an isomorphism
which identifies the homology of with coefficients in , def. , with the bare homology of tensored with .
Before we give the proof we state the following lemma.
For a chain complex of free modules and Mod any module, there is a long exact sequence of the form
where are the boundaries and the cycles of in degree and where is the canonical inclusion.
Since, by prop. , every submodule of a free module over our ring is itself free, such as the submodule of cycles , it follows that for each we have a splitting, def. , of the short exact sequence and hence, by prop. , a direct sum decomposition
Here the second direct summand on the right is identified, as indicated, under the differential with the boundaries in one degree lower, since by construction is injective on .
Accordingly, if we regard the graded modules and of boundaries and cycles as chain complexes with vanishing differential, then we have a sequence of chain maps
which is degreewise a short exact sequence, hence is a short exact sequence of chain complexes. Now since the tensor product of modules distributes over direct sum, the image of this sequence under
is still a split exact sequence hence in particular still a short exact sequence. The induced homology long exact sequence, as discussed there, is the long exact sequence to be shown: one reads off that it has the right terms and it is straightforward to check that the connecting homomorphisms are indeed given by as stated.
By lemma we have short exact sequences
Since the tensor product of modules is a right exact functor it preserves cokernels and hence
which is what we needed to show on the left.
The dual statement were true if were also a left exact functor. In general it is not, and the failure is measured by the Tor-group:
Notice that with prop. the defining short exact sequence
exhibits as a projective resolution of , by remark . Therefore by definition of Tor the group is the chain homology in degree 1 of
which is
and this is indeed what we have to show on the right hand side.
The following statement is a kind of dualization of the previous one. Instead of tensor products of modules it involves the Hom of modules, and instead of Tor-modules it involves Ext-modules as corrections.
(universal coefficient theorem in ordinary cohomology)
Let be a chain complex of modules over a principal ideal domain , which is degreewise a free module. Let be an module. Then there is a short exact sequence
with the Ext-module on the left.
Given a homomorphism of modules together with a retract of , there is a short exact sequence of cokernels
Since we work in Mod, all the cokernels appearing here (as discussed there) may be expressed as quotients, e.g .
The sequence of inclusions induces the canonical short exact sequence
and we claim that this is already isomorphic to the one stated in the lemma. This is manifestly true for the two terms on the right. For the term on the left observe that induces a morphism . By the existence of the retract this has itself a retract. Moreover it factors as
Therefore the first morphism here on the left has to be an isomorphism, too.
Write
for the short exact sequence of boundaries, cycles, and homology groups of in degree . Since is assumed to be a free module and since and are submodules, it follows that these are also free, by prop. . Therefore this sequence exhibits a projective resolution of the group . It follows that the Ext-group is characterized by the short exact sequence
Notice also that the short exact sequence
is split because, as before, is free abelian. Using these two exact sequences on the left and right of the short exact sequence
shows that this is equivalent to
Again this splits as is free abelian.
In addition to these exact sequence consider the decomposition
and apply to obtain the diagram
Here the right vertical sequence is exact, because (7) splits, and the left vertical sequence is exact because (8) splits. The upper horizontal sequence is exact because the hom functor takes cokernels to kernels and finally the lower horizontal sequence is the exact sequence (6).
Since therefore and are monomorphisms, it follows that the degree -cocycles are
Using this for replaced by shows by the upper horizontal exact sequence that
Similarly the coboundaries are seen to be
Together this gives the cochain cohomology as
Now the universal coefficient theorem follows by going into lemma with the identifications , , .
The universal coefficient theorem in homology, theorem, involves the tensor product of modules. The following generalizes this to the tensor product of chain complexes, def. .
For a principal ideal domain, given a chain complex of free modules over and given any other chain complex , then for each there is a short exact sequence of the form
In the special case that is concentrated in degree 0, this is the universal coefficient theorem in ordinary homology, theorem .
In particular if all the Tor-groups on the right vanish, then the theorem asserts an isomorphism
which identifies the homology of a tensor product with the tensor product of the separate homologies.
This is the case (assuming the axiom of choice) notably if is a field (since every module over a field is a free module – every vector space has a basis – and every free module is a flat module).
Notice that since is assumed to be free, hence a direct sum of with itself, since the tensor product of modules distributes over direct sums, and since chain homology respects direct sums, we have
First consider now the special case that all the differentials of are zero, so that . In this case (9) yields and therefore
Since is a free module by assumption, it has no Tor-terms (by the discussion there) and hence this is the statement to be shown.
Now let be a general chain complex of free modules. Notice that for each the cycle-chain-boundary-short exact sequence
splits due to the assumption that is a free module, and hence (as discussed at split exact sequence) that it exhibits a direct sum decomposition . Since the tensor product of modules distributes over direct sum, it follows that tensoring with any yields another short exact sequence
This means that if we regard the graded modules and of chains and of boundaries as chain complexes with zero-differentials, then we have a short exact sequence of chain complexes
This induces its homology long exact sequence, prop. , of the form
Here the terms involving the complexes and of boundaries and cycles may be evalutated, since these have zero differentials, via the special case discussed at the beginning of this proof to yield the long exact sequence
where is the morphism induced from the inclusion of boundaries into cycles.
This means that by quotienting out an image on the left and a kernel on the right, we obtain a short exact sequence
Since the tensor product of modules is a right exact functor it commutes with the cokernel on the left, as does the formation of direct sums, and so we have
This is the left term in the short exact sequence to be shown. For the right term the analogous argument does not quite go through, because tensoring is not in addition a left exact functor, in general. The failure to be so is precisely measured by the Tor-module:
Notice that by the assumption that is free and using prop. that over our the submodules are themselves free modules, the defining short exact sequence exhibits a projective resolution of . Therefore by definition of Tor we have
This identifies the term on the right of the exact sequence to be shown.
These theorems are of particular use in the computation of singular cohomology, due to the following fact.
Let Top two topological spaces. The singular cohomology of their product topological space is isomorphic to that of the tensor product of chain complexes of their singular chain complexes separately
This is a consequence of the Eilenberg-Zilber theorem, which we discuss below in section 14).
Let be two topological spaces. Let be a field. Then the singular homology of their product topological space in some degree is the direct sum of the tensor products of the singular homologies of the spaces separately, whose degrees add up to .
This finishes the statements and proofs of the universal coefficient theorem and the Künneth theorem. We turn now to a tool that allows to produce more refined theorems of this kind.
We have motivated – in chapter 2) – chain complexes and their homological algebra from the singular chain complexes of topological spaces. While these do enjoy many nice formal properties, as we have discussed, they are not well-adapted to explicit computations of homology groups: there are in general “too many singular chains” in a topological space to say anything useful about them without further information.
The canonical piece of extra information needed to do explicit computations of homology groups for concrete topological spaces is a filtering of – a decomposition of into “layers” – in the form of a sequence of subspaces such that in each step there is some information on the structure that is added. In such a situation we can refine the notion of homology to relative homology, where one studies relative cycles in whose boundary does not necessarily vanish, but is constrained to be one step lower in filtering degree . Such relative homology of filtered topological spaces often allows to compute genuine singular homology by induction over the filtering degree. A particularly explicit realization of this idea is applicable when is obtained from by specifically attaching sets of -disks – the basic cells in homotopy theory. We begin this section below by explaining the resulting cellular homology of such topological spaces, which are called CW-complexes. The central fact about this cellular homology defined in terms of boundaries relative to filtering degree is that it does coincide with the genuine singular homology and hence provides an efficient means for computing the latter, when available.
But the argument that shows this directly generalizes to homology relative to higher shifts in filtering degree: one finds immediately – and we discuss this in detail below – that for the -relative cycles are themselves the homology of -relative cycles in the filtered complex in a natural sense. The resulting tower of relative cycles of arbitrary relative degree is called (for no good reason, unfortunately, but ever since the notion was conceived) the spectral sequence of the filtered complex.
Via the motivating example of cellular homology we introduce this general notion of spectral sequences, see what it has to say about cellular homology and indicate in an outlook how with the same kind of simple argument a plethora of questions in homological algebra can be answered. In particular, given a double complex (as we discussed in section 6)) its total complex is naturally filtered either by row- or by column-degree and hence there is a spectral sequence of a double complex which helps with computing its total homology.
Such total homologies of double complexes are of interest notably whenever one computes the value of a derived functor not on a single object, but on a chain complex of objects. A plethora of applications of spectral sequences arises this way. At the end of this section we provide some pointers to further reading on this.
We now begin with introducing basics of relative homology and then eventually and hopefully seamlessly derive the notion of spectral sequences from that.
Let be a topological space and a topological subspace. Write for the chain complex of singular homology on , def. and for the chain map induced by the subspace inclusion according to def. .
The (degreewise) cokernel of this inclusion, hence the quotient of by the image of under the inclusion, is the chain complex of -relative singular chains.
A boundary in this quotient is called an -relative singular boundary,
a cycle is called an -relative singular cycle.
The chain homology of the quotient is the -relative singular homology of
This means that a singular -chain is an -relative cycle precisely if its boundary is, while not necessarily 0, contained in the -chains of : . So the boundary vanishes possibly only “up to contributions coming from ”.
We record two evident but important classes of long exact sequences that relative homology groups sit in:
Let be a topological subspace inclusion. The corresponding relative singular homology, def. , sits in a long exact sequence of the form
The connecting homomorphism sends an element represented by an -relative cycle , to the class represented by the boundary .
This is the homology long exact sequence, prop. , induced by the defining short exact sequence of chain complexes.
Let be a sequence of two topological subspace inclusions. Then there is a long exact sequence of relative singular homology groups of the form
Observe that we have a short exact sequence of chain complexes, def.
The corresponding homology long exact sequence, prop. , is the long exact sequence in question.
We look at some concrete fundamental examples in a moment. But first it is useful to make explicit the following general sub-notion of relative homology.
Let still be a given topological space.
The augmentation map for the singular homology of is the homomorphism of abelian groups
which adds up all the coefficients of all 0-chains:
Since the boundary of a 1-chain is in the kernel of this map, by example , it constitutes a chain map
where now is regarded as a chain complex concentrated in degree 0.
The reduced singular chain complex of is the kernel of the augmentation map, the chain complex sitting in the short exact sequence
The reduced singular homology of is the chain homology of the reduced singular chain complex
Equivalently:
The reduced singular homology of , denoted , is the chain homology of the augmented chain complex
Let be a topological space, its singular homology and its reduced singular homology, def. .
For there is an isomorphism
The homology long exact sequence, prop. , of the defining short exact sequence is, since here is concentrated in degree 0, of the form
Here exactness says that all the morphisms for positive are isomorphisms. Moreover, since is a free abelian group, hence a projective object, the remaining short exact sequence
is split, by prop. , and hence .
For the point, the morphism
is an isomorphism. Accordingly the reduced homology of the point vanishes in every degree:
Now we can discuss the relation between reduced homology and relative homology.
For an inhabited topological space, its reduced singular homology, def. , coincides with its relative singular homology relative to any base point :
Consider the sequence of topological subspace inclusions
By prop. this induces a long exact sequence of the form
Here in positive degrees we have and therefore exactness gives isomorphisms
and hence with prop. isomorphisms
It remains to deal with the case in degree 0. To that end, observe that is a monomorphism: for this notice that we have a commuting diagram
where is the terminal map. That the outer square commutes means that and hence the composite on the left is an isomorphism. This implies that is an injection.
Therefore we have a short exact sequence as shown in the top of this diagram
Using this we finally compute
With this understanding of homology relative to a point in hand, we can now characterize relative homology more generally. From its definition in def. , it is plausible that the relative homology group provides information about the quotient topological space . This is indeed true under mild conditions:
A topological subspace inclusion is called a good pair if
is closed inside ;
has an neighbourhood such that has a deformation retract.
If is a topological subspace inclusion which is good in the sense of def. , then the -relative singular homology of coincides with the reduced singular homology, def. , of the quotient space :
The proof of this is spelled out at Relative homology – relation to quotient topological spaces. It needs the proof of the Excision property of relative homology. While important, here we will not further dwell on this. The interested reader can find more information behind the above links.
With the general definition of relative homology in hand, we now consider the basic cells such that cell complexes built from such cells have tractable relative homology groups. Actually, up to weak homotopy equivalence, every Hausdorff topological space is given by such a cell complex and hence its relative homology, then called cellular homology, is a good tool for computing singular homology rather generally.
For write
The reduced singular homology of the -sphere equals the -relative homology of the -disk with respect to the canonical boundary inclusion : for all
The -sphere is homeomorphic to the -disk with its entire boundary identified with a point:
Moreover the boundary inclusion is a good pair in the sense of def. . Therefore the example follows with prop. .
When forming cell complexes from disks, then each relative dimension will be a wedge sum of disks:
For a set of pointed topological spaces, their wedge sum is the result of identifying all base points in their disjoint union, hence the quotient
The wedge sum of two pointed circles is the “figure 8”-topological space.
Let be a set of pointed topological spaces. Write for their wedge sum and write for the canonical inclusion functions.
Then for each the homomorphism
is an isomorphism.
By prop. the reduced homology of the wedge sum is equivalently the relative homology of the disjoint union of spaces relative to their disjoint union of basepoints
The relative homology preserves these coproducts (sends them to direct sums) and so
The following defines topological spaces which are inductively built by gluing disks to each other.
A CW complex of dimension is the empty topological space.
By induction, for a CW complex of dimension is a topological space obtained from
a -complex of dimension ;
an index set ;
a set of continuous maps (the attaching maps)
as the pushout
in
hence as the topological space obtained from by gluing in -disks for each along the given boundary inclusion .
By this construction, an -dimensional CW-complex is canonically a filtered topological space, hence a sequence of topological subspace inclusions of the form
which are the right vertical morphisms in the above pushout diagrams.
A general CW complex then is a topological space which is the limiting space of a possibly infinite such sequence, hence a topological space given as the sequential colimit over a tower diagram each of whose morphisms is such a filter inclusion
The following basic facts about the singular homology of CW complexes are important.
Now we can state a variant of singular homology adapted to CW complexes which admits a more systematic way of computing its homology groups. First we observe the following.
The relative singular homology, def. , of the filtering degrees of a CW complex , def. , is
where denotes the free abelian group on the set of -cells.
The inclusion is a good pair in the sense of def. . The quotient is by definition of CW-complexes a wedge sum, def. , of -spheres, one for each element in . Therefore by prop. we have an isomorphism with the reduced homology of this wedge sum. The statement then follows by the respect of reduced homology for wedge sums, prop. .
For a CW complex with skeletal filtration as above, and with we have for the singular homology of that
In particular if is a CW-complex of finite dimension (the maximum degree of cells), then
Moreover, for the inclusion
is an isomorphism and for we have an isomorphism
By the long exact sequence in relative homology, prop. we have an exact sequence of the form
Now by prop. the leftmost and rightmost homology groups here vanish when and and hence exactness implies that
is an isomorphism for . This implies the first claims by induction on .
Finally for the last claim use that the above exact sequence gives
and hence that with the above the map is surjective.
We can now discuss the cellular homology of a CW complex.
For a CW-complex, def. , its cellular chain complex is the chain complex such that for
the abelian group of chains is the relative singular homology group, def. , of relative to :
the differential is the composition
where is the boundary map of the singular chain complex and where is the morphism on relative homology induced from the canonical inclusion of pairs .
The composition of two differentials in def. is indeed zero, hence is indeed a chain complex.
On representative singular chains the morphism acts as the identity and hence acts as the double singular boundary, .
This means that
a cellular -chain is a singular -chain required to sit in filtering degree , hence in ;
a cellular -cycle is a singular -chain whose singular boundary is not necessarily 0, but is contained in filtering degree , hence in .
a cellular -boundary is a singular -chain which is the boundary of a singular -chain coming from filtering degree .
This kind of situation – chains that are cycles only up to lower filtering degree and boundaries that come from specified higher filtering degree – has an evident generalization to higher relative filtering degrees. And in this greater generality the concept is of great practical relevance. Therefore before discussing cellular homology further now, we consider this more general “higher-order relative homology” that it suggests (namely the formalism of spectral sequences). After establishing a few fundamental facts about that we will come back in prop. below to analyse the above cellular situation using this conceptual tool.
First we abstract the structure on chain complexes that in the above example was induced by the CW-complex structure on the singular chain complex.
The structure of a filtered chain complex in a chain complex is a sequence of chain map inclusions
The associated graded complex of a filtered chain complex, denoted , is the collection of quotient chain complexes
We say that element of are in filtering degree .
In more detail this means that
is a chain complex, hence are objects in (-modules) and are morphisms (module homomorphisms) with ;
For each there is a filtering on and all these filterings are compatible with the differentials in that
The grading associated to the filtering is such that the -graded elements are those in the quotient
Since the differentials respect the grading we have chain complexes in each filtering degree .
Hence elements in a filtered chain complex are bi-graded: they carry a degree as elements of as usual, but now they also carry a filtering degree: for we therefore also write
and call this the collection of -chains in the filtered chain complex.
Accordingly we have -cycles and -boundaries. But for these we may furthermore refine to a notion where also the filtering degree of the boundaries is constrained:
Let be a filtered chain complex. Its associated graded chain complex is the set of chain complexes
for all .
Then for we say that
is the module of -chains or of -chains in filtering degree ;
is the module of -almost -cycles (the -chains whose differential vanishes modulo terms of filtering degree );
is the module of -almost -boundaries.
Similarly we set
From this definition we immediately have that the differentials restrict to the -almost cycles as follows:
The differentials of restrict on -almost cycles to homomorphisms of the form
These are still differentials: .
By the very definition of it consists of elements in filtering degree on which decreases the filtering degree to . Also by definition of differential on a chain complex, decreases the actual degree by one. This explains that restricted to lands in . Now the image constists indeed of actual boundaries, not just -almost boundaries. But since actual boundaries are in particular -almost boundaries, we may take the codomain to be .
As before, we will in general index these differentials by their codomain and hence write in more detail
We have a sequence of canonical inclusions
The following observation is elementary, and yet this is what drives the theory of spectral sequences, as it shows that almost cycles may be computed iteratively by homological means themselves.
The -almost cycles are the -kernel inside the -almost cycles:
An element represents
an element in if
an element in if even .
The second condition is equivalent to representing the 0-element in the quotient . But this is in turn equivalent to being 0 in .
With a definition of almost-cycles and almost-boundaries, of course we are now interested in the corresponding homology groups:
For define the -almost -chain homology of the filtered complex to be the quotient of the -almost -cycles by the -almost -boundaries, def. :
By prop. the differentials of restrict on the -almost homology groups to maps
The central property of these -almost homology groups now is their following iterative homological characterization.
With definition we have that is the -chain homology of :
This structure on the collection of -almost cycles of a filtered chain complex thus obtained is called a spectral sequence:
A spectral sequence of -modules is
a set of -modules;
a set of homomorphisms
such that
the s are differentials: ;
the modules are the -homology of the modules in relative degree :
One says that is the -page of the spectral sequence.
Since this turns out to be a useful structure to make explicit, as the above motivation should already indicate, one introduces the following terminology and basic facts to talk about spectral sequences.
Let be a spectral sequence, def. , such that for each there is such that for all we have
Then one says that
the bigraded object
is the limit term of the spectral sequence;
If for a spectral sequence there is such that all differentials on pages after vanish, , then is a limit term for the spectral sequence. One says in this cases that the spectral sequence degenerates at .
By the defining relation
the spectral sequence becomes constant in from on if all the differentials vanish, so that for all .
If for a spectral sequence there is such that the th page is concentrated in a single row or a single column, then the spectral sequence degenerates on this pages, example , hence this page is a limit term, def. . One says in this case that the spectral sequence collapses on this page.
For the differentials of the spectral sequence
have domain and codomain necessarily in different rows an columns (while for both are in the same row and for both coincide). Therefore if all but one row or column vanish, then all these differentials vanish.
A spectral sequence is said to converge to a graded object with filtering , traditionally denoted
if the associated graded complex of is the limit term of , def. :
In practice spectral sequences are often referred to via their first non-trivial page, often also the page at which it collapses, def. , often already the second page. Then one tends to use notation such as
to be read as “There is a spectral sequence whose second page is as shown on the left and which converges to a filtered object as shown on the right.”
A spectral sequence is called a bounded spectral sequence if for all the number of non-vanishing terms of total degree , hence of the form , is finite.
A spectral sequence is called
a first quadrant spectral sequence if all terms except possibly for vanish;
a third quadrant spectral sequence if all terms except possibly for vanish.
First notice that if a spectral sequence has at most non-vanishing terms of total degree on page , then all the following pages have at most at these positions non-vanishing terms, too, since these are the homologies of the previous terms.
Therefore for a bounded spectral sequence for each there is such that for all and all . Similarly there is such for all and all .
We claim then that the limit term of the bounded spectral sequence is in position given by the value for
This is because for such we have
Therefore
The central statement about the notion of the spectral sequence of a filtered chain complex then is the following proposition. It says that the iterative computation of higher order relative homology indeed in the limit computes the genuine homology.
For a filtered complex, write for
This defines a filtering of the homology, regarded as a graded object.
If the spectral sequence of a filtered complex of prop. has a limit term, def. then it converges, def. , to the chain homology of
i.e. for sufficiently large we have
where on the right we have the associated graded object of the filtering of def. .
By assumption, there is for each an such that for all the -almost cycles and -almost boundaries, def. , in are the ordinary cycles and boundaries. Therefore for def. gives .
This says what these spectral sequences are converging to. For computations it is also important to know how they start out for low . We can generally characterize for very low values of simply as follows:
because for we automatically also have since the differential respects the filtering degree by assumption.
There is, in general, a decisive difference between the homology of the associated graded complex and the associated graded piece of the genuine homology : in the former the differentials of cycles are required to vanish only up to terms in lower degree, but in the latter they are required to vanish genuinely. The latter expression is instead the value of the spectral sequence for , see prop. below.
These general facts now allow us, as a first simple example for the application of spectral sequences to see transparently that the cellular homology of a CW complex, def. , coincides with its genuine singular homology.
First notice that of course the structure of a CW-complex on a topological space , def. naturally induces on its singular simplicial complex the structure of a filtered chain complex, def. :
For a CW complex, and , write
for the singular chain complex of . The given topological subspace inclusions induce chain map inclusions and these equip the singular chain complex of with the structure of a bounded filtered chain complex
(If is of finite dimension then this is a bounded filtration.)
Write for the spectral sequence of a filtered complex corresponding to this filtering.
The spectral sequence of singular chains in a CW complex , def. converges, def. , to the singular homology of :
The spectral sequence is clearly a first-quadrant spectral sequence, def. . Therefore it is a bounded spectral sequence, def. and hence has a limit term, def. . So the statement follows with prop. .
We now identify the low-degree pages of with structures in singular homology theory.
– is the group of -relative (p+q)-chains, def. , in ;
– is the -relative singular homology, def. , of ;
–
– .
By straightforward and immediate analysis of the definitions.
As a result of these general considerations we now obtain the promised isomorphism between the cellular homology and the singular homology of a CW-complex :
For Top a CW complex, def. , its cellular homology, def. coincides with its singular homology , def. :
By the third item of prop. the -page of the spectral sequence is concentrated in the -row and hence it collapses there, def. . Accordingly we have
for all . By the third and fourth item of prop. this non-trivial only for and there it is equivalently
Finally observe that by the definition of the filtering on the homology, def. , and using prop. .
This concludes our discussion of how relative homology theory of cellularly filtered objects allows to efficiently compute the genuine homology of these objects, and how this motivates the general concept of spectral sequences as organizing higher order relative homology groups. In the next section we consider an important special special class of filtered objects – the total complexes of double complexes – and apply these tools to analyze them.
In 6) we had discussed basic properties of double complexes. A central aspect of double complexes is that by a kind fo amalgamation they induce an ordinary chain complex, called their total complex. The conceptual relevance of this construction rests in the fact, which we indate below in V, that a double complex is a diagram of complex and its total complex is the correspoding homotopy colimit of this diagram, hence the universal way of “gluing” the rows in the double complex to a single complex. Here we just focus on examples of the explicit construction and analyse the homology of total chain complexes using the tool of spectral sequences introduced above.
For a double chain complex, the corresponding total chain complex is the chain complex whose degree- module is the direct sum of all entries of total degree :
and whose differential is the sum, with column-degree-weighted sign, of the horizontal and vertical differentials of the double complex, hence on a direct summand given by
One important example of this we have already seen.
Let be two chain complexes. Write for the double complex which in degree is the tensor product of modules , whose horizontal differential is and whose vertical differential is .
Then the corresponding total complex , def. , is the tensor product of chain complexes of def. :
The total complex of a double complex , def. , becomes a filtered chain complex, def. either by filtering by row degree
or by column degree
The spectral sequence of a filtered complex induced by either or on the total complex of a double complex is accordingly called the spectral sequence of a double complex.
Let be the spectral sequence of a double complex , according to def. , with respect to the horizontal filtration. Then the first few pages are for all given by
;
;
.
Moreover, if is concentrated in the first quadrant (), then the spectral sequence converges to the chain homology of the total complex:
This is a matter of unwinding the definition, using prop. . We display equations for the horizontal filtering, the other case works analogously.
The 0th page is by definition the associated graded piece
The first page is the chain homology of the associated graded chain complex:
In particular this means that representatives of are given by such that . It follows that , which by the definition of a total complex acts as , acts on these representatives just as and this gives the second page
Finally, for concentrated in the corresponding filtered chain complex is a non-negatively graded chain complex with filtration bounded below. Therefore the spectral sequence converges as claimed by prop. .
As a first example application we can tie up a loose end of section 10 b) (remark ): we show that forming the derived functor of the tensor product in the first argument yields the same result as deriving in the second argument.
Let be a commutative ring. For Mod, the two ways of computing the Tor left derived functor coincide
and hence we can consistently write for either.
Let and be projective resolutions of and , respectively, def. . The corresponding tensor product of chain complexes , hence by prop. the total complex of the degreewise tensor product of modules double complex carries the filtration by horizontal degree as well as that by vertical degree.
Accordingly there are the corresponding two spectral sequences of a double complex, to be denoted here (for the filtering by -degree) and (for the filtering by -degree). By the discussion there, both converge to the chain homology of the total complex.
We find the value of both spectral sequences on low degree pages according to prop. :
The 0th page for both is
For the first page we have
and
Now using the universal coefficient theorem in homology, theorem , and the fact that and is a resolution by projective objects, by construction, hence of tensor acyclic objects for which all Tor-modules vanish, this simplifies to
and similarly
It follows for the second pages that
and
Now both of these second pages are concentrated in a single row and hence have converged on that page already. Therefore, since they both converge to the same value:
The total complexes of double complexes are ubiquituous in homological algebra for a general abstract reason, and hence so are their spectral sequences. Accordingly there are many names for many spectral sequences of particular filtered and notably of total complexes. The interested reader may find further pointers at Spectral sequences - list of examples.
It turns out that the chain complexes in homological algebra discussed here are a shadow of the richer concept of spectra in stable homotopy theory. For an introduction to this subject see
Under this generalization the spectral sequence of a filtered complex discussed here generalizes to the spectral sequence of a filtered spectrum. Important examples of these are the Atiyah-Hirzebruch spectral sequence and the Adams spectral sequence. These are discussed in
and
respectively.
: the basis abelian category, assumed (without serious restriction of generality) to be Mod, throughout, for some commutative ring ;
category of chain complexes in in degrees with differential decreasing the degree;
category of cochain complexes in degrees with differential increasing the degree;
category of chain complexes with degree in and differential decreasing the degree.
homotopy category of chain complexes, obtained from by quotienting out chain homotopy
homotopy category of cochain complexes, obtained from by quotienting out cochain homotopy
derived category, obtained from as the full subcategory on the degreewise projective objects;
derived category, obtained from as the full subcategory on the degreewise injective objects;
Here are some recommended further references to go with the above material. (For a fairly comprehensive list of related literature see also at homological algebra - References.)
From our chapter II on we follow material in outline as in chapters 1, 2, 3 and 5 of the classical textbook:
This book focuses on explicit component constructions. The novice reader happy with such can entirely stick to this book as parallel reading and safely ignore all of the following pointers.
The more systematic theory which we briefly allude to in chapter III is well exposed for instance in the textbook
Therefore the ambitious novice desiring more conceptual background might profit from at least browsing through the following lecture notes that accompany this book:
The basic algebraic topology that we use in chapter I) for motivational purposes is nicely discussed in
Similarly, a good place to look up the notions that we mention in chapter I and chapter V is
A homological algebra textbook which amplifies the relation to homotopy theory as in our chapters I) and V) is
For the refinement of homological algebra to stable homotopy theory see
I thank Todd Trimble for technical discussion while this page was being created. Notably, Todd kindly wrote up some of the proofs on the nLab that are not shown here but linked to.
And many thanks to Danny Stevenson for comments on the writeup and for catching a bunch of typos.
Last revised on October 8, 2023 at 06:09:18. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.