Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

In this talk we will begin by discussing the problem of understanding the topology of the space of Riemannian metrics of positive scalar curvature on a smooth manifold. Recently much progress has occurred in this topic. We will then look at an application of the theory of operads to this problem in the case when the underlying manifold is an n-sphere. In the case when n>2, this space is a homotopy commutative, homotopy associative H-space. In particular, we show that it admits an action of the little n-disks operad. Via theorems of Stasheff, Boardman, Vogt and May, this allows us to demonstrate that the path component of this space containing the round metric, is weakly homotopy equivalent to an n-fold loop space.