Topos Theory (Part 5)

It’s time to understand why the category of sheaves on a topological space acts like the category of sets in the following ways:

• It has finite colimits.
• It has finite limits.
• It is cartesian closed.
• It has a subboject classifier.

We summarize these four properties by saying the category of sheaves is an elementary topos. (In fact it’s better, since it has all limits and colimits.)

As a warmup, first let’s see why that the category of presheaves on a topological space is an elementary...