The number of homomorphisms from the Hawaiian earring group (Q1714851)

The theory of fundamental groups of compact metric spaces is fairly complicated, and exhibits algebraic phenomena unseen in the realm of fundamental groups of compact locally contractible metric spaces, that is, in the realm of finitely presentable groups. The main examples in this context are the fundamental groups of the Hawaiian Earring (HEG) and of the Harmonic Archipelago (HAG). For example, every homomorphism from HEG to the integers factors through the fundamental group of finitely many circles of the Hawaiian Earring. This observation was one of the motivations to introduce the notion of non-commutative slenderness, n-slenderness for short, of a group. On the other hand, there are no non-trivial homomorphisms from HAG to the integers. In this paper the author studies homomorphisms defined on HEG and HAG in connection to slenderness. The two main results are the following. Theorem A: If \(G\) is a group with \(|G|< 2^{\aleph_0}\), then \(|\mathrm{Hom}(\text{HEG},G)|\) is either \(|G|\) (in case \(G\) is n-slender) or \(2^{2^{\aleph_0}}\). Theorem B: The group of automorphisms of HAG contains the isomorphic copy of the full symmetric group on a set of cardinality continuum. Thus it is of cardinality \(2^{2^{\aleph_0}}\) and contains isomorphic copies of all groups of size at most \(2^{\aleph_0}\). The author then characterizes n-slenderness for groups of small cardinality and for subgroups of HEG. He also provides an example of an n-slender group with nontrivial divisible element.