Classification of locally 2-connected compact metric spaces (Q2567410)

The aim of this paper is to prove that, for compact metric spaces which do not contain infinite complete graphs, the (strong) property of being ``locally 2-dimensional'' is guaranteed just by a (weak) local connectivity condition. Specifically, we prove that a locally 2-connected, compact metric space \(M\) either contains an infinite complete graph or is surface like in the following sense: There exists a unique surface \(S\) such that \(S\) and \(M\) contain the same finite graphs. Moreover, \(M\) is embeddable in \(S\), that is, \(M\) is homeomorphic to a subset of \(S\).