Aspherical Relative Presentations all Over Again

Abstract

The concept of asphericity for relative group presentations was introduced twenty five years ago. Since then, the subject has advanced and detailed asphericity classifications have been obtained for various families of one-relator relative presentations. Through this work the definition of asphericity has evolved and new applications have emerged. In this article we bring together key results on relative asphericity, update them, and exhibit them under a single set of definitions and terminology. We describe consequences of asphericity and present techniques for proving asphericity and for proving non-asphericity. We give a detailed survey of results concerning one-relator relative presentations where the relator has free product length four.