JOURNAL OF PURE AND APPLIED ALGEBRA ELSEI’IER Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra 136 (1999) IL56 On the cyclic homology of exact categories Bernhard Keller * Communicated by C. Kassel; received 3 February 1997; received in revised form 21 June 1997 Abstract The cyclic homology of an exact category was defined by McCarthy (1994) using the methods of Waldhausen (1985). McCarthy’s theory enjoys a number of desirable properties, the most basic being the ugreemrnt property, i.e. the fact that when applied to the category of finitely generated projective modules over an algebra it specializes to the cyclic homology of the algebra. However, we show that McCarthy’s theory cannot be both compatible with localizations and invariant under functors inducing equivalences in the derived category. This is our motivation for introducing a new theory for which all three properties hold: extension, invariance and localization. Thanks to these properties, the new theory can be com- puted explicitly for a number of categories of modules and sheaves. @ 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. AMS Clus.s$icution: 16E40; 18EIO; 18E30; 18F25 0. Introduction 0. I. Overvirw of’ the results Let k be a commutative ring and ,al an exact category in the sense of [30] which is moreover k-linear, i.e. the groups Homk(A,B), A,B E d, are endowed with k-module structures such that the composition is bilinear. In [26], McCarthy has defined the Hochschild, cyclic, negative and periodic homolo- gies of .Ce. He showed that they enjoy the following properties * E-mail:
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