On uniqueness of Cartesian products of surfaces with boundary (Q2577118)

The main result is that any compact, connected 4-manifold, possibly with boundary, has at most one decomposition into the product of prime 2-manifolds, a prime manifold being one which has no decomposition as a product of manifolds of lower dimension. By way of contrast the result fails if one factor is a closed interval; for example the products of a disc with two holes, respectively a torus with a hole, with a closed interval are homeomorphic.