Australian Category Seminar

Representable tangent structures for affine schemes

Marcello Lanfranchiยท21 May 2025

The category of affine schemes is a tangent category whose tangent bundle is given by Kahler differentials. How special is this tangent structure? Is there any other tangent structure in the category of affine schemes? In this talk, we classify the representable tangent structures in the category of affine schemes, by introducing a useful tool: the notion of tangentoid. When the base ring R is a principal ideal domain, we show there are only two such tangent structures: the aforementioned one and the trivial one. We also show that when R is not a PID, we have other non-trivial representable tangent structures.

This is joint work with JS Lemay.

Here's our paper: (link)

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