Operads

In the most recent blog post we discussed homotopy associativity and how to transfer algebraic structures on topological spaces. There we in particular used topological groups, which are topological spaces with group structures. That said, any group is a topological group by equipping it with the discrete topology. So if we want to study some actual topology, and not just glorified group theory, we need to look at where multiplications and binary operations arise naturally in topology....

Imagine we have a system of two topological spaces $f:T\longrightarrow G$. We are often interested in knowing if a certain property on the space $G$ can be transferred through f such that we have the same property on $T$. If f is a nice enough morphism an example could be a topological invariant of $G$, for example its Euler characteristic. In this post we are more interested in transferring other things than invariants, more specifically structures....