We travel the years in order to understand the relationship between Nilpotency and Riemannian geometry: including Gromov's almost flat theorem for manifolds with bounded curvature and Fukaya-Yamaguchi's almost nilpotency of spaces with lower sectional bounds.  Time allowing we will discuss the Milnor conjecture and nilpotency on spaces with lower Ricci bounds.   Required background should be minimal and most of our discussions should take place in the form of concrete examples.