[FOM] Etale cohomology in third order, how and why?

[Colin McLarty]

On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 9:36 PM, John Baldwin <jbaldwin at uic.edu> wrote:

asked about accessible accounts of the mathematical reasons for etale
cohomology.  A brilliant expository piece is

@ARTICLE{MumDel,
  AUTHOR =       "Mumford, David and Tate, John",
  TITLE =        "{Fields} {M}edals {IV}. {A}n instinct for the key idea",
  JOURNAL =      "Science",
  YEAR =         "1978",
  volume =       "202",
  pages =        "737--739",

Honestly, until just now i had fond memories of various fuller nice
accounts.  But as i look them up again, all are thinner and thornier
than i recalled.  Probably the best is the review by Bloch.

http://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1981-04-02/S0273-0979-1981-14894-1/S0273-0979-1981-14894-1.pdf

You will have to skim through some very technical parts to get to all
of the more accessible parts.

Colin