We prove that the Gromov–Hausdorff distance from the circle with its geodesic metric to any simply connected geodesic space is never smaller than
π
4
\frac {\pi }{4}
. We also prove that this bound is tight through the construction of a simply connected geodesic space
E
\mathrm {E}
which attains the lower bound
π
4
\frac {\pi }{4}
. We deduce the first statement from a general result that we also establish which gives conditions on how small the Gromov–Hausdorff distance between two geodesic metric spaces
(
X
,
d
X
)
(X, d_X)
and
(
Y
,
d
Y
)
(Y, d_Y )
has to be in order for
π
1
(
X
)
\pi _1(X)
and
π
1
(
Y
)
\pi _1(Y)
to be isomorphic.