A survey of homotopy nilpotency and co-nilpotency

We review known and state some new results on homotopy nilpotency and co-nilpotency of spaces. Next, we take up the systematic study of homotopy nilpotency of homogenous spaces G/K for a Lie group G and its closed subgroup K < G. The homotopy nilpotency of the loop spaces Ω(Gn,m(K)) and Ω(Vn,m(K)) of Grassmann Gn,m(K) and Stiefel Vn,m(K) manifolds for K = R, C, the field of reals or complex numbers and H, the skew R-algebra of quaternions is shown.