The revised and uniform fundamental groups and universal covers of geodesic spaces (Q1947000)

According to Sormani and Wei a compact geodesic space has a categorical universal cover if and only if its covering/critical spectrum is finite. In this paper the author extends the above results by studying the geometry and topology of a slightly generalized revised fundamental group and another associated group called the uniform fundamental group. To this end, the generalized covering methods developed by Berestovskii and Plaut for uniform spaces are applied to the class of compact geodesic spaces. The results and proofs of the author are described in the language of discrete homotopy theory and the critical spectrum. It is shown that a compact geodesic space \(X\) has a universal cover if and only if the following hold: 1) its revised and uniform fundamental groups are finitely presented, or, more generally, countable; 2) its revised fundamental group is discrete as a quotient of the quasitopological fundamental group \(\pi_1^{qtop}(X).\) The author classifies the topological singularities in \(X.\) It is proved that the above conditions imply closed liftings of all sufficiently small path loops to all covers of \(X,\) generalizing in this way the semilocally simply connected property. A geodesic space \(X\) with this newly introduced property is called semilocally \(r\)-simply connected. Indeed \(X\) has a universal cover if and only if the latter condition holds. The covering topology on \(\pi_1(X)\) is introduced as a geometrization of both Brazas-Fabel's shape topology and the topology induced by the more general Spanier groups. Connections between properties of the covering topology, the existence of simply connected and universal covers, and geometries on the fundamental group are investigated.