I'm forwarding this to this list on behalf of a student of mine.
Thanks in advance for any information.
Michael Hopkins
Forwarded message:
>
> I'm curious about historical background about the notion of covering
> spaces, particularly with respect to their relationship with the
> fundamental group. Basically all I've found out is that Poincare
> introduced the fundamental group in 1895, and that covering maps probably
> came out of Riemann's work, but I have no idea when it was first realized
> that the latter could help compute the former.
>