Simply-connected polyhedra dominate only finitely many different shapes (Q5935979)

According to K. Borsuk the capacity \(C(A)\) of a compactum \(A\) denotes the cardinality of the class of all shapes of compacta \(X\), for which \(Sh(X)\leq Sh(A)\). Is the capacity of each polyhedron finite? In 1996 the present author was able to prove that the answer is in general negative. The present paper is devoted to a proof of: Theorem. The capacity of a simply connected polyhedron is finite. The proof translates the question into a problem of dominations of homotopy types and uses the theory of nilpotent groups and CW spaces. In particular, a question about \(C(A)\) is translated into a question about \(G(X)\) (=set of homotopy types of finite type nilpotent CW complexes \(Y\) for which \(X_{(p)}\simeq Y_{(p)}\), for all primes \(p\), including \(p=0\)).