One of the building blocks of a scheme is a topological space. Topological spaces have continuous functions, but continuous functions are too general to reflect the underlying algebraic structure of interest. The other ingredient in a scheme, therefore, is a sheaf on the topological space, called the "structure sheaf". On each open subset of the topological space, the sheaf specifies a collection of functions, called "regular functions". The topological space and the structure sheaf together are required to satisfy conditions that mean the functions come from algebraic operations.