The topological fundamental group and free topological groups

Jeremy Brazas

Published 2010-06-01, updated 2010-07-19Version 3

The topological fundamental group $\pi_{1}^{top}$ is a homotopy invariant finer than the usual fundamental group. It assigns to each space a quasitopological group and is discrete on spaces which admit universal covers. For an arbitrary space $X$, we compute the topological fundamental group of the suspension space $\Sigma(X_+)$ and find that $\pi_{1}^{top}(\Sigma(X_+))$ either fails to be a topological group or is the free topological group on the path component space of $X$. Using this computation, we provide an abundance of counterexamples to the assertion that all topological fundamental groups are topological groups. A relation to free topological groups allows us to reduce the problem of characterizing Hausdorff spaces $X$ for which $\pi_{1}^{top}(\Sigma(X_+))$ is a Hausdorff topological group to some well known classification problems in topology.