The combinatorial structure of the Hawaiian earring group (Q1580364)

The Hawaiian earring is the subspace of the plane consisting of countably many circles, one of radius \(1/n\) for each natural number \(n\), all of which have exactly one point in common. The fundamental group of the Hawaiian earring is uncountable and not a free group. The purpose of the present paper is to give a combinatorial description of the group of the Hawaiian earring by representing elements by infinite (transfinite) words, multiplication by concatenation of such words and reduction by cancellation, with unique reduced representatives, generalizing the familiar theory of free groups. A transfinite word is defined as a map from a totally ordered set into a set of letters (an alphabet which is countably infinite in the case of the Hawaiian earring group) such that the preimage of each letter is finite. For an arbitrary alphabet, the resulting groups are called `big free groups' (if the alphabet is finite one has the usual free groups), and their basic properties are studied in the present paper.