Regularity, complete intersection and Gorenstein properties of a local ring can be characterized by homological conditions on the canonical homomorphism into its residue field. In positive characteristic, the Frobenius endomorphism (and, more generally, any contracting endomorphism) can also be used for these characterizations. We introduce here a class of local homomorphisms, in some sense larger than all above, for which these characterizations still hold, providing an unified treatment for this class of homomorphisms.

In this paper, we prove that cyclic homology, topological cyclic homology, and algebraic $K$-theory satisfy a pro Mayer–Vietoris property with respect to abstract blow-up squares of varieties, in both zero and finite characteristic. This may be interpreted as the well-definedness of $K$-theory with compact support.

We provide a brief description of the mathematics that led to Daniel Quillen's introduction of model categories, a summary of his seminal work “Homotopical algebra”, and a brief description of some of the developments in the field since.

Let R be an associative ring which is not necessarily commutative. For any torsion theory τ on the category of left R-modules and for any nonnegative integer n we define and study the notion of the nth local cohomology functor with respect to τ. For suitably nice rings a bound for the nonvanishing of these functors is given in terms of the τ-dimension of the modules.