For two closed subschemes of a scheme , their intersection is their fiber product of schemes over . On an affine chart, ideals give the quotient by . This retains nonreduced structure and intersection multiplicities which a set-theoretic intersection would lose.
For a closed subscheme with ideal sheaf , one has . Locally a flat deformation ideal satisfies . Lifting to gives a well-defined map killing . Conversely the graph condition defines an ideal with flat quotient by the flatness criterion over dual numbers. These operations commute with restriction and are inverse, giving the global identification without a smoothness assumption.