Hawaiian earring

In mathematics, the Hawaiian earring is the topological space defined by the union of circles in the Euclidean plane with center and radius for endowed with the subspace topology: The space is homeomorphic to the one-point compactification of the union of a countable family of disjoint open intervals. The Hawaiian earring is a one-dimensional, compact, locally path-connected metrizable space. Although is locally homeomorphic to at all non-origin points, is not semi-locally simply connected at . Therefore, does not have a simply connected covering space and is usually given as the simplest example of a space with this complication. The Hawaiian earring looks very similar to the wedge sum of countably infinitely many circles; that is, the rose with infinitely many petals, but these two spaces are not homeomorphic. The difference between their topologies is seen in the fact that, in the Hawaiian earring, every open neighborhood of the point of intersection of the circles contains all but finitely many of the circles (an ε-ball around (0, 0) contains every circle whose radius is less than ε/2); in the rose, a neighborhood of the intersection point might not fully contain any of the circles. Additionally, the rose is not compact: the complement of the distinguished point is an infinite union of open intervals; to those add a small open neighborhood of the distinguished point to get an open cover with no finite subcover. The Hawaiian earring is neither simply connected nor semilocally simply connected since, for all the loop parameterizing the nth circle is not homotopic to a trivial loop. Thus, has a nontrivial fundamental group sometimes referred to as the Hawaiian earring group. The Hawaiian earring group is uncountable, and it is not a free group. However, is locally free in the sense that every finitely generated subgroup of is free. The homotopy classes of the individual loops generate the free group on a countably infinite number of generators, which forms a proper subgroup of .

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Rose (topology)

In mathematics, a rose (also known as a bouquet of n circles) is a topological space obtained by gluing together a collection of circles along a single point. The circles of the rose are called petals. Roses are important in algebraic topology, where they are closely related to free groups. A rose is a wedge sum of circles. That is, the rose is the quotient space C/S, where C is a disjoint union of circles and S a set consisting of one point from each circle. As a cell complex, a rose has a single vertex, and one edge for each circle.

Locally simply connected space

In mathematics, a locally simply connected space is a topological space that admits a basis of simply connected sets. Every locally simply connected space is also locally path-connected and locally connected. The circle is an example of a locally simply connected space which is not simply connected. The Hawaiian earring is a space which is neither locally simply connected nor simply connected. The cone on the Hawaiian earring is contractible and therefore simply connected, but still not locally simply connected.

Hawaiian earring

MATH-323: Algebraic topology

Homology is one of the most important tools to study topological spaces and it plays an important role in many fields of mathematics. The aim of this course is to introduce this notion, understand it