title: Stratified space
text: # Stratified space
  
  In mathematics, especially in topology, a stratified space is a topological space that admits or is equipped with a stratification, a decomposition into subspaces, which are nice in some sense (e.g., smooth or flat).
  
  A basic example is a subset of a smooth manifold that admits a Whitney stratification. But there is also an abstract stratified space such as a Thom–Mather stratified space.
  
  On a stratified space, a constructible sheaf can be defined as a sheaf that is locally constant on each stratum.
  
  Among the several ideals, Grothendieck's Esquisse d’un programme considers (or proposes) a stratified space with what he calls the tame topology.
  
  ## A stratified space in the sense of Mather
  
  Mather gives the following definition of a stratified space. A prestratification on a topological space X is a partition of X into subsets (called strata) such that (a) each stratum is locally closed, (b) it is locally finite and (c) (axiom of frontier) if two strata A, B are such that the closure of A intersects B, then B lies in the closure of A. A stratification on X is a rule that assigns to a point x in X a set germ $S_{x}$ at x of a closed subset of X that satisfies the following axiom: for each point x in X, there exists a neighborhood U of x and a prestratification of U such that for each y in U, $S_{x}$ is the set germ at y of the stratum of the prestratification on U containing y.
  
  A stratified space is then a topological space equipped with a stratification.
  
  ## Pseudomanifold
  
  In the MacPherson's stratified pseudomanifolds; the strata are the differences $X_{i+i}-X_i$ between sets in the filtration. There is also a local conical condition; there must be an almost smooth atlas where locally each little open set looks like the product of two factors $R^nx$ c(L); a euclidean factor and the topological cone of a space L. Classically, here is the point where the definitions turns to be obscure, since L is asked to be a stratified pseudomanifold. The logical problem is avoided by an inductive trick which makes different the objects L and X.
  
  The changes of charts or cocycles have no conditions in the MacPherson's original context. Pflaum asks them to be smooth, while in the Thom-Mather context they must preserve the above decomposition, they have to be smooth in the Euclidean factor and preserve the conical radium.
  
  