Timeline for Why are operads useful?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
15 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Dec 29, 2011 at 8:47 | comment | added | Thomas Riepe | A nice survey by Bruno Vallette: math.unice.fr/~brunov/publications/Algebra+Homotopy=Operad.pdf | |
| Aug 13, 2011 at 3:49 | vote | accept | CommunityBot | moved from User.Id=6976 by developer User.Id=69903 | |
| Aug 13, 2011 at 3:49 | history | edited | user6976 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Aug 11, 2011 at 17:47 | comment | added | John_L | Operads are not a tool (like van Kampen diagrams). They are a language. Recognizing that something is an operad gives you a convienient language to manipulate it. You might ask yourself the same question about "groups". You could (any many people once did) manipulate collections of matrices that are closed under multiplication. Abstracting that clears away the extraneous clutter and gives you a framework to manipulate your group. | |
| Aug 11, 2011 at 14:02 | answer | added | Giorgio Mossa | timeline score: 3 | |
| Aug 11, 2011 at 13:31 | answer | added | Vladimir Dotsenko | timeline score: 7 | |
| Aug 11, 2011 at 11:44 | answer | added | Tyler Lawson | timeline score: 11 | |
| Aug 9, 2011 at 20:27 | answer | added | Jeffrey Giansiracusa | timeline score: 12 | |
| Aug 9, 2011 at 19:15 | answer | added | Ryan Budney | timeline score: 22 | |
| Aug 9, 2011 at 18:57 | comment | added | Michael A Warren | Unlike the example you give (van Kampen diagrams), I think (and someone will surely disagree with this) that operads are more immediately useful as a tool for defining things than for proving things. In particular, using operads we can define structures which might otherwise be combinatorially cumbersome to specify and to reason about. Once understood in terms of operads, it is often easier to prove things about such structures (e.g., loop spaces) and we can see similarities between a priori distinct structures (e.g., Steve's (1) below). | |
| Aug 9, 2011 at 18:09 | answer | added | Steve | timeline score: 25 | |
| Aug 9, 2011 at 17:48 | comment | added | user6976 | @Gerhard: I have done so. The answer I am looking for (2-3 lines) is not there. | |
| Aug 9, 2011 at 17:40 | answer | added | Igor Rivin | timeline score: 2 | |
| Aug 9, 2011 at 17:40 | comment | added | Gerhard Paseman | Something that takes less than 10 minutes and might be useful to you (if you have not already done this): Use "operads" as a search term in the MathOverflow article search, and skim over the results, picking one or two questions that appeal to you and glance over them. One that I liked was mathoverflow.net/questions/36222/… . Gerhard "Ask Me About System Design" Paseman, 2011.08.09 | |
| Aug 9, 2011 at 17:20 | history | asked | user6976 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |