Atom in a topos Created 2026-10-06 Updated 2026-10-07
An atom is a noninitial object with only the empty and whole subobject. In the atomic finite-surjection site, the sheaf component generated by one primitive class is an atom: membership of one descendant in a subobject descends to its primitive ancestor and then propagates to all descendants. A decomposition into atoms makes subobjects selections of components.