Finitely presented groups and the Whitehead nightmare (Q2357412)

A smooth compact manifold \(M\) is called \textit{weakly geometrically simply connected} (WGSC) if it admits a filtration by compact and simply connected manifolds. A finitely presented group \(G\) is called \textit{quasi-simply filtered} (QSF) if and only if there exists a smooth compact manifold \(M\) with \(\pi_1 (M)=G\) whose universal cover is WGSC. In this paper certain representations of QSF groups are studied. These representations are non-degenerate essentially surjective simplicial maps from a WGSC space \(X\) into a 3-complex associated to a finite presentation of a QSF group. In particular it is shown that any QSF group admits a WGSC representation which is locally finite, equivariant and whose double point set is closed.