Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2002 iii Paper 22 7 ii Solution 2026-10-14
We prove Booleanity directly from the dense-cover description. Let be a subsheaf of a sheaf . Its pseudocomplement consists of sections such that no restriction along any arrow into belongs to . This is a subpresheaf. It is also a sheaf: if a section of restricts into on a dense covering sieve on a category, any hypothetical restriction into has a further restriction in that cover; it would then belong to both and , impossible. Thus the unique amalgamation in of an -matching family lies in .
For any , the sieve on a category of arrows on which its restriction lies in or is dense. Given an arrow , either some further restriction belongs to , supplying the required member of that sieve on a category, or none does, in which case the restriction along itself belongs to . Therefore is locally all of , so their join in the sheaf topos is . Their intersection is empty. Every subsheaf consequently has a complement, proving the topos is Boolean.
For two-valuedness, let be a nonempty subterminal sheaf. At some stage , its value is the singleton. For every there is an arrow , so restriction makes the singleton as well. At any stage , the sieve on a category of arrows into whose domains are at least is dense: after an arrow with domain , choose a further domain and use the existence of arrows downwards. On this covering sieve on a category the unique terminal section has a matching family in , so the sheaf condition gives . Hence . Since the empty sieve on a category never covers, the empty presheaf is an initial sheaf distinct from . Thusand the topos is two-valued, in the distinct global sense of a two-valued topos.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2002 iii Paper 22 7 v Solution 2026-10-14
The sheaf is noninitial: it contains , whose value at includes . In a two-valued topos its support, the image of , can therefore only be . An image equal to would force , since the initial object of a topos is strict. Consequently every is an epimorphism.
Products of sheaves on a small site exist and are computed as products of the underlying presheaves, since a product of unique matching-family amalgamations again uniquely amalgamates. For the countable product , its value at stage is . The factor with is empty by the stronger statement proved in the preceding part. Thus at every stage , with the unique empty restriction maps. It is the empty presheaf, already an initial sheaf because no empty sieve on a category covers. HenceThis proves the final PDF-only request and exhibits the separating tower site with vanishing product. It is a genuine failure of countable choice in this Boolean two-valued sheaf topos; it does not contradict the classical external construction of the site.
Separating tower site with vanishing product 2026-10-14
Consider a site indexed by natural-number objects with arrows only downwards, the cancellation condition for equally typed , and the separation condition that arrows , admit with but . Its dense-sieve sheaf topos is a Boolean topos and a two-valued topos. The representables are separated. No nonempty partial map exists, by the separation condition and naturality. The associated sheaves consequently admit no maps . Each has nonzero support and maps epimorphically to one, but their product has an empty value at every stage , because its factor does.