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Eilenberg Maclane spaces are basic building blocks of homotopy theory.
Dror Farjoun said in the first lecture of an algebraic topology course that he considered one of the major conceptual advances in algebraic topology in the latter half of the 20th century to be the realization that infinite dimensional manifolds need not be horrible and frightening, and could be quite useful.

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Eilenberg Maclane spaces are basic building blocks of homotopy theory.