ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Coherent sheaf cohomology

Let's say you have a big pile of books that you want to organize. But instead of organizing them by author or subject, you want to organize them by the way they're connected to each other. You might put books that are similar or related to each other in the same pile.

Now, imagine that instead of books, we have mathematical objects called "sheaves". These are collections of mathematical functions that are related to each other. And just like with books, we want to organize them in a way that reflects how they relate to each other.

One way we can do this is by looking at how these sheaves "glue together" over various regions, or "open sets". We can think of these open sets as little sections of a big puzzle, and each sheaf is a piece of that puzzle. We can study how these pieces fit together to form the bigger picture.

Now, let's say we want to measure how "complicated" each of these sheaves is, in a way that takes into account how they fit together. We can do this using something called "cohomology". Cohomology tells us how many "holes" or "obstructions" there are in our puzzle at different levels of complexity.

If we have a particularly nice set of sheaves, called a "coherent sheaf", then we can use something called "coherent sheaf cohomology" to measure how complicated they are in a way that's especially well-behaved. We can use this to study how these sheaves fit together and how complicated they are overall.

So, in summary, coherent sheaf cohomology is a way of measuring how complicated collections of mathematical functions (called "sheaves") are, by studying how they fit together over various sections of a bigger puzzle. It can help us understand how these sheaves relate to each other and how complex they are overall.