TITLE: Reason for studying coherent sheaves on complex manifolds.
QUESTION [15 upvotes]: Hello everybody! I would be interested in knowing, what the reason is for investigating coherent sheaves on complex manifolds. By definition a sheaf $F$ on a complex manifold $X$ is coherent, when it is locally finitely presented (i.e. every point possesses a neighborhood $U$, such that $F \mid U$ is the image of $O_X^n\mid U$ under some surjective morphism) and locally of finite presentation (i.e. for an open súbset $U \subseteq X$ and a surjective morphism $f: O_U^n \rightarrow F \mid U$ of sheaves the kernel of $f$ is locally finitely presented).
My question now is: Why are such sheaves especially interesting? Why might somebody be interested in studying them or what is the intuition behind them?
Every help will be appreciated.

REPLY [10 votes]: Let me complete Georges' good answer by this. A natural class of
object to study on manifolds are vector bundles. There are many reasons to be interested in them, but to name one, there are the examples of the tangent and cotangent bundles,
of which the sections are vector fields and differential forms, two fundamental classes
of geometric object on the manifold. Now vector bundles are essentially the same thing
as locally free coherent sheaves (to a bundle one attach its sheaf which to an one set $U$ attached the section of the bundle on $U$). This is a reason to study at least certain
coherent sheaves, namely the locally free ones. But it turn out that the category of locally free coherent sheaves has an important short-coming: it is not abelian. Certain morphisms
have trivial kernel and cockerel, but are not isomorphisms, like the multiplication by
a function which vanishes at exactly one point from the structural sheaf to itself.
So one has to work with a larger category, which is abelian, namely the category of coherent sheaves.