Titles of the references on the Hawaiian earring Wikipedia page, clearly designed to make math actually seem fun:
“The big fundamental group, big Hawaiian earrings, and the big free groups”
“Anomalous behavior of the Hawaiian earring group”
“The fundamental groups of one-dimensional wild spaces and the Hawaiian earring”
“The singular homology of the Hawaiian earring”
“The topological Hawaiian earring group does not embed in the inverse limit of free groups”
Very true. Coming from a soon-to-be-rightfully-titled mathematician, the Hawaiian earring group is one of the less well-understood spaces out there. In fact, the last quotation pretty much sums up everything we know about it, and in a sense it says, “this space is so wild and pathological that it’s beyond what mathematics has a grasp on right now.”
But of course, this comes from a guy who truly does think mathematics is actually fun. (and I could rant all day about how everyone else would too)
I will grudgingly admit that math can actually be fun… lately I’ve been having fun learning about the mathematical properties of the high-dimenssional spaces used in statistical mechanics.
But mainly, I envy mathematicians their titles. It would be fun if I could tell people I work on big, wild Hawaiian earrings instead of something incomprehensible like the cis-regulatory logic of Hedgehog gradients in Drosophila.