Dense products in fundamental groupoids

Abstract

Infinitary operations, such as products indexed by countably infinite linear orders, arise naturally in the context of fundamental groups and groupoids. Despite the fact that the usual binary operation of the fundamental group determines the operation of the fundamental groupoid, we show that, for a locally path-connected metric space, the well-definedness of countable dense products in the fundamental group need not imply the well-definedness of countable dense products in the fundamental groupoid. Additionally, we show the fundamental groupoid \(\Pi _1(X)\) has well-defined dense products if and only if X admits a generalized universal covering space.