This book is an introduction to the theory of toposes, as first developed by Grothendieck and later developed by Lawvere and Tierney. Beginning with several illustrative examples, the book explains the underlying ideas of topology and sheaf theory as well as the general theory of elementary toposes and geometric morphisms and their relation to logic. This is the first text to address all of these various aspects of topos theory at the graduate student level.

This text presents topos theory as it has developed from the study of sheaves. Sheaves arose in geometry as coefficients for cohomology and as descriptions of the functions appropriate to various kinds of manifolds (algebraic, analytic, etc.). Sheaves also appear in logic as carriers for models of set theory as well as for the semantics of other types of logic. Grothendieck introduced a topos as a category of sheaves for algebraic geometry. Subsequently, Lawvere and Tierney obtained elementary axioms for such (more general) categories.

Zusammenfassung

From the reviews:

"A beautifully written book, a long and well motivated book packed with well chosen clearly explained examples. ... authors have a rare gift for conveying an insider's view of the subject from the start. This book is written in the best Mac Lane style, very clear and very well organized. ... it gives very explicit descriptions of many advanced topics--you can learn a great deal from this book that, before it was published, you could only learn by knowing researchers in the field." (Wordtrade, 2008)

Inhalt
Prologue.- Categorial Preliminaries.- I. Categories of Functors.- 1. The Categories at Issue.- 2. Pullbacks.- 3. Characteristic Functions of Subobjects.- 4. Typical Subobject Classifiers.- 5. Colimits.- 6. Exponentials.- 7. Propositional Calculus.- 8. Heyting Algebras.- 9. Quantifiers as Adjoints.- Exercises.- II. Sheaves of Sets.- 1. Sheaves.- 2. Sieves and Sheaves.- 3. Sheaves and Manifolds.- 4. Bundles.- 5. Sheaves and Cross-Sections.- 6. Sheaves as Étale Spaces.- 7. Sheaves with Algebraic Structure.- 8. Sheaves are Typical.- 9. Inverse Image Sheaf.- Exercises.- III. Grothendieck Topologies and Sheaves.- 1. Generalized Neighborhoods.- 2. Grothendieck Topologies.- 3. The Zariski Site.- 4. Sheaves on a Site.- 5. The Associated Sheaf Functor.- 6. First Properties of the Category of Sheaves.- 7. Subobject Classifiers for Sites.- 8. Subsheaves.- 9. Continuous Group Actions.- Exercises.- IV. First Properties of Elementary Topoi.- 1. Definition of a Topos.- 2. The Construction of Exponentials.- 3. Direct Image.- 4. Monads and Beck's Theorem.- 5. The Construction of Colimits.- 6. Factorization and Images.- 7. The Slice Category as a Topos.- 8. Lattice and Heyting Algebra Objects in a Topos.- 9. The Beck-Chevalley Condition.- 10. Injective Objects.- Exercises.- V. Basic Constructions of Topoi.- 1. Lawvere-Tierney Topologies.- 2. Sheaves.- 3. The Associated Sheaf Functor.- 4. Lawvere-Tierney Subsumes Grothendieck.- 5. Internal Versus External.- 6. Group Actions.- 7. Category Actions.- 8. The Topos of Coalgebras.- 9. The Filter-Quotient Construction.- Exercises.- VI. Topoi and Logic.- 1. The Topos of Sets.- 2. The Cohen Topos.- 3. The Preservation of Cardinal Inequalities.- 4. The Axiom of Choice.- 5. The Mitchell-Bénabou Language.- 6. Kripke-Joyal Semantics.- 7. Sheaf Semantics.- 8. Real Numbers in a Topos.- 9. Brouwer's Theorem: All Functions are Continuous.- 10. Topos-Theoretic and Set-Theoretic Foundations.- Exercises.- VII. Geometric Morphisms.- 1. Geometric Morphismsand Basic Examples.- 2. Tensor Products.- 3. Group Actions.- 4. Embeddings and Surjections.- 5. Points.- 6. Filtering Functors.- 7. Morphisms into Grothendieck Topoi.- 8. Filtering Functors into a Topos.- 9. Geometric Morphisms as Filtering Functors.- 10. Morphisms Between Sites.- Exercises.- VIII. Classifying Topoi.- 1. Classifying Spaces in Topology.- 2. Torsors.- 3. Classifying Topoi.- 4. The Object Classifier.- 5. The Classifying Topos for Rings.- 6. The Zariski Topos Classifies Local Rings.- 7. Simplicial Sets.- 8. Simplicial Sets Classify Linear Orders.- Exercises.- IX. Localic Topoi.- 1. Locales.- 2. Points and Sober Spaces.- 3. Spaces from Locales.- 4. Embeddings and Surjections of Locales.- 5. Localic Topoi.- 6. Open Geometric Morphisms.- 7. Open Maps of Locales.- 8. Open Maps and Sites.- 9. The Diaconescu Cover and Barr's Theorem.- 10. The Stone Space of a Complete Boolean Algebra.- 11. Deligne's Theorem.- Exercises.- X. Geometric Logic and Classifying Topoi.- 1. First-OrderTheories.- 2. Models in Topoi.- 3. Geometric Theories.- 4. Categories of Definable Objects.- 5. Syntactic Sites.- 6. The Classifying Topos of a Geometric Theory.- 7. Universal Models.- Exercises.- Appendix: Sites for Topoi.- Epilogue.- Index of Notation.