Gerbe

In mathematics, a gerbe (/dʒɜːrb/; French: [ʒɛʁb]) is a construct in homological algebra and topology. Gerbes were introduced by Jean Giraud (Giraud 1971) following ideas of Alexandre Grothendieck as a tool for non-commutative cohomology in degree 2. They can be seen as a generalization of principal bundles to the setting of 2-categories. Gerbes provide a convenient, if highly abstract, language for dealing with many types of deformation questions especially in modern algebraic geometry. In addition, special cases of gerbes have been used more recently in differential topology and differential geometry to give alternative descriptions to certain cohomology classes and additional structures attached to them.

"Gerbe" is a French (and archaic English) word that literally means wheat sheaf.

A gerbe on a topological space X is a stack G of groupoids over X which is locally non-empty (each point in X has an open neighbourhood U over which the section category G(U) of the gerbe is not empty) and transitive (for any two objects a and b of G(U) for any open set U, there is an open covering {V_i}_i of U such that the restrictions of a and b to each V_i are connected by at least one morphism).

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