A topological approach to the theory of groups acting on trees

Bass and Serre recast the foundations of combinatorial group theory in [7]. Here we apply the allied notions of fundamental group and covering space to redevelop their theory in a less combinatorial fashion; for example the Bass—Serre Structure Theorem is proved with no a priori knowledge of the group theoretic structure of the fundamental group of a graph of groups. Van Kampen's Theorem is used only once, in its simplest form (in the proof of Theorem 7). Cancellation arguments and normal form theorems, such as Britton's Lemma, are completely avoided; indeed they are incidental corollaries from our viewpoint. The tree which plays a central role in [7] appears in Theorem 2 as the natural analogue of the “strecken komplexe” introduced by A. Speiser [8], and subsequently also employed by R. Nevanlinna [5], to describe certain simply connected Riemann surfaces occurring in value distribution theory.