Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Misconceptions about KXK_X

This is the title of a very short paper by Steven Kleiman published in L'enseignement mathématique, and which should be studied by every young student in scheme theory.

Here, XX is a scheme and KXK_X is the sheaf of rational functions on XX.

The misconceptions are the following, where we write Frac(A)\mathop{Frac}(A) for the total ring of fractions of a ring AA, namely the localized ring with respect to all element which are not zero divisors.

  1. KXK_X is not the sheaf associated to the presheaf UFrac(Γ(U,OX))U\mapsto \mathop{Frac}(\Gamma(U,O_X)); indeed, that map may not be a presheaf.
  2. The germ KX,xK_{X,x} of KXK_X at a point xx may not be the total ring of fractions of the local ring OX,xO_{X,x}, it may be smaller.
  3. If U=Spec(A)U=\mathop{Spec}(A) is an affine open subset of XX, then Γ(U,KX)\Gamma(U,K_X) is not necessarily equal to Frac(A)\mathop{Frac}(A).
These mistakes can be found in the writings of very good authors, even Grothendieck's EGA IV... 
By chance, the first one is corrected in a straightforward way, and the other two work when the scheme XX is locally noetherian.

Thanks to Antoine D. for indicating to me this mistake, and to Google for leading me to Kleiman's paper.

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