On the First Homology of Peano Continua

Abstract

We show that the first homology group of a locally connected compact metric space is either uncountable or is finitely generated. This is related to Shelah's well-known result which shows that the fundamental group of such a space satisfies a similar criterion. We give an example of such a space whose fundamental group is uncountable but whose first homology is trivial, showing that our result doesn't follow from Shelah's. We clarify a claim made by Pawlikowski and offer a proof of the clarification.