No label defined (Q4946053)

The Hawaiian earring, the union of the circles of radius \(1/2n\) and center \((1/2n,0)\) in the plane, is a standard example used to illustrate the difference between the weak topology on a \(1\)-complex and finer topologies. Regarded as a \(1\)-complex with the weak topology, its fundamental group is free on countably many generators, but with the metric topology as a subspace of the plane, its fundamental group is much larger, since a loop based at \((0,0)\) can make infinitely many circuits around the circles, provided that their radii limit to \(0\). To understand the fundamental groups of this and other such examples, the authors are developing a theory of weighted group presentations, in which a weight function assigns to each generator and each relation a positive number. Roughly speaking, the weight is the diameter of the corresponding \(1\)-cell or \(2\)-cell in the metric. In previous work, as yet unpublished, the second author initiated weighted combinatorial group theory. He defined the concept of an omega-group, which is a group with a weight function which assigns positive weights to its nonzero elements, satisfying several axioms. Also, for a weighted alphabet \((X,w)\), he defined the weighted word group \(\Omega(X,w)\). An element of \(\Omega(X,w)\) is represented by an order-type \(\omega\), that is, a closed nowhere-dense subset of the interval \([0,1]\) that contains the end points, together with an assignment to each component \((a_i,b_i)\) of \([0,1]-\omega\) of an element \(x_i\) of \(X\), such that \(w(x_i)\to 0\) as \(b_i-a_i\to 0\). There is an equivalence relation on these objects, generated by cancelling inverse blocks, and the equivalence classes are the elements of \(\Omega(X,w)\). The weight of an element is the maximum of the weights assigned to the open intervals of its reduced representative. Then, \(\Omega(X,w)\) is a free object in the category of omega-groups. In this paper, the authors develop the low-dimensional topology required for weighted combinatorial group theory. For each weighted alphabet \((X,w)\), they construct a corresponding wild metric \(1\)-complex \(Z(X)\). This is a \(1\)-complex with a single \(0\)-cell \(z_0\), and a topology in which a sequence of \(1\)-cells limits onto \(z_0\) when their weights limit to \(0\). The first main result is that the fundamental group of \(Z(X)\) based at \(z_0\) is isomorphic to \(\Omega(X,w)\). The second part of the paper concerns weighted presentations which have generators a weighted alphabet \((X,w)\), and relations with weights greater than or equal to their weights as elements of \(\Omega(X,w)\). For such a presentation, the authors construct a corresponding wild metric \(2\)-complex and prove that its fundamental group is the quotient of \(\Omega(X,w)\) by the weighted normal closure of the set of relators. However, this quotient does not always have the structure of an omega-group. The proofs of all results are given in considerable detail, and several illustrative examples are provided. J. W. Cannon and G. R. Conner have also developed a combinatorial description for elements of the Hawaiian earring and other one-dimensional spaces [\textit{J. W. Cannon} and \textit{G. R. Conner}, Topology Appl. 106, No. 3, 225-271 (2000; Zbl 0955.57002); ibid., 273-291 (2000; Zbl 0955.57003)], and consider generalizations of the fundamental group where the unit interval is replaced by more general linearly ordered spaces [\textit{J. W. Cannon} and \textit{G. R. Conner}, On the fundamental group of one-dimensional spaces, Topology Appl., to appear]. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0933.00033].