The fundamental groups of subsets of closed surfaces inject into their first shape groups (Q813181)

For locally complicated spaces it is a difficult task to calculate and understand the fundamental group. In this article, in their main result, the authors show that for every subset X of a closed surface M\(^{2}\) and every \(x_{0}\in X\), the naturally induced homomorphism \(\varphi :\pi _{1}(X,x_{0})\rightarrow \pi _{1}^{\sim }(X,x_{0})\), from the fundamental group to the first shape homotopy group, is injective. In particular, if \(X\subseteq M^{2}\) is a proper compact subset, then \(\pi _{1}(X,x_{0})\) is isomorphic to a subgroup of the limit of an inverse sequence of finitely generated free groups. Consequently, \(\pi _{1}(X,x_{0})\) is locally free, fully residually free and residually finite. In another important result the authors show that if X is any space such that \(\varphi :\pi _{1}(X,x_{0})\rightarrow \pi _{1}^{\sim }(X,x_{0})\) is injective, then X is homotopically Hausdorff at \(x_{0}\). Their proofs use some special properties of subsets of the plane. Since these results are central to their main theorem, the authors include a complete proof in the Appendix.