A note on commutators in free products

Abstract

In (1), Higman introduces the unrestricted free product of a set of groups, and gives it a natural topology. When this set is an infinite sequence of free cyclic groups he denotes by F their unrestricted free product; we shall denote by K the product for a general sequence {Gn} and, throughout the paper, we assume that each Gn is non-trivial and countable. Higman proves as an incidental result that the commutator subgroup [F, F] is not closed in the topological group F, and the first object of this note is to generalize this result to K. From this, the more interesting deduction immediately follows that K is never equal to L = [K, K]. Indeed, we prove in fact that the cardinal of L and its index in K are both c, the cardinal of the continuum.