BilTop | Walker Stern | A story about spans

Spans in a category C arise in a variety of disparate contexts, from the study partially defined functions between sets to Lagrangian correspondences in symplectic geometry. In this talk, I will give an overview of some of these connections and tell a story which leads from algebras in categories of spans to operads. Along the way, I will discuss past and ongoing work (part of the latter joint with Ivan Contreras and Rajan Mehta) analyzing and classifying various algebraic structures in spans.