From: Nick Kuhn <njk4x@adams.math.virginia.edu>
Date: Wed,  9 Feb 100 14:01:33 -0500
Subject: question for the alg top discussion list

Here is a question particularly addressed to old guys, where "old
guys" are defined to be people older than me (and not necessarily
guys).  "Young folk" (= everyone else) are welcome to answer too.

In pondering various oddball questions concerning nasty things one
might want to do to a pair consisting of a space and commutative
S-algebra (aka E_infty ring spectrum), I have found myself reading a
an interesting chapter in an unpublished 200 page manuscript by Ed
Floyd & son (Bill) entitled "Actions of the Classical Small
Categories of Topology".  Ed had been working on this in the years
before he died in late 1990, and I think that parts of this went
back 20 years before.

The chapter in question is entitled "The infinite symmetric product
as a source of models of spectra", and a good part of the chapter
concerns connecting a construction of M.C.McCord generalizing
infinite symmetric products (see a 1969 TAMS paper) to Segal's
theory of Gamma spaces.  As written, one follows naturally from the
other.

Did anyone around 1970 connect McCord and Segal's work?  Maybe
everyone back then knew this - when I hunt through the literature I
find many more papers referenced than seem to have ever been
published (versions of Segal's paper, stuff by D.W. Anderson, ...),
so who knows what what circulating in mimeographed notes.  But I've
yet to find any paper about Gamma spaces that references McCord.

Nick Kuhn
njk4x@virginia.edu