ABSTRACT
The operads of little discs (and the equivalent operads of little cubes) were introduced in topology, in the works of Boardman–Vogt [7, 8] and May [47], for the recognition of iterated loop spaces. We refer to the paper [18], in the handbook of algebraic topology, for an account of these applications. We also refer to the literature for the general definition of an operad in a category and for the precise definition of the little discs operads, which we denote by D n https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-u.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781351251624/8b1079f9-023e-42f1-82dd-5172537bcc8a/content/inline-math11_1.jpg"/> throughout this chapter.
