For the last decade there has been a generalized trend in mathematics on the search for large algebraic structures (linear spaces, closed subspaces, or infinitely generated algebras) composed of mathematical objects enjoying certain special properties. This trend has caught the eye of many researchers and has also had a remarkable influence in real and complex analysis, operator theory, summability theory, polynomials in Banach spaces, hypercyclicity and chaos, and general functional analysis. This expository paper is devoted to providing an account on the advances and on the state of the art of this trend, nowadays known as lineability and spaceability. 109 5. Some remarks and conclusions. General techniques 113 About the authors 117 Acknowledgments 118 References 118Theorem 1.2 (Gurariy, 1966 [178]). The set of continuous nowhere differentiable functions on [0, 1] is lineable.Let us also recall that, although the set of everywhere differentiable functions in R is, in itself, an infinite dimensional vector space, in 1966 Gurariy obtained the following analogue of Theorem 1.1.License or copyright restrictions may apply to redistribution; see https://www.ams.org/journal-terms-of-use LINEAR SUBSETS OF NONLINEAR SETS IN TOPOLOGICAL VECTOR SPACES 73 Theorem 1.3 (Gurariy, 1966 [178]). The set of everywhere differentiable functions on [0, 1] is not spaceable in C[0, 1]. Also, there exist closed infinite dimensional subspaces of C[0, 1] all of whose members are differentiable on (0, 1).Somehow, what we are seeing is that what one could expect to be an isolated phenomenon can actually even have a nice algebraic structure (in the form of infinite dimensional subspaces). Unfortunately, and as we mentioned above, the Baire category theorem cannot be employed in the search for large subspaces such as the ones mentioned in the previous results. Let us now provide a more formal and complete definition for the above concepts and some other ones. Definition 1.4 (Lineability and spaceability [22,181,253]). Let X be a topological vector space and M a subset of X. Let μ be a cardinal number.(1) M is said to be μ-lineable (μ-spaceable) if M ∪ {0} contains a vector space (resp. a closed vector space) of dimension μ. At times, we shall refer to the set M as simply lineable or spaceable if the existing subspace is infinite dimensional.(2) We also let λ(M ) be the maximum cardinality (if it exists) of such a vector space. 1 (3) When the above linear space can be chosen to be dense in X, we shall say that M is μ-dense-lineable.Moreover, Bernal introduced in [69] the notion of maximal-lineable (and those of maximal-dense-lineable and maximal-spaceable), meaning that, when keeping the above notation, the dimension of the existing linear space equals dim(X). Besides asking for linear spaces, one could also study other structures, such as algebrability and some related ones, which were presented in [25,27,253]. Definition 1.5. Given a Banach algebra A, a subset B ⊂ A, and two cardinal numbers α and β, we say that: