From: Ralph Cohen Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2006 07:57:11 -0800 There has been some discussion recently about the fact that the homotopy orbit space of the conjugation action of a group on itself is homotopy equivalent to the free loop space of BG. I wonder if anyone knows how old this result is, and where it first appeared in the literature. One citation that is commonly given is to Waldhausen, when he defined the cyclic bar construction. However my guess is that this result was known much earlier to the "greats", like Bott, Samelson, perhaps John Moore, or even Steenrod. Anybody know how old this result is? Thanks, Ralph