Finiteness theorems for nonnegatively curved vector bundles (Q1847834)

In the paper under review the authors prove several finiteness theorems for the normal bundles to souls in nonnegatively curved manifolds. Its main point is that one can sometimes get diffeomorphism finiteness for ambient Riemannian manifolds, provided their topology is concentrated on compact domains of ``bounded geometry''. At first, the authors review some well-known results on homotopy count of maps in equicontinuous families. Next they give a background in characteristic classes and related invariants of maps. Finally, the authors prove applications to nonnegatively curved manifolds and explain the extent to which a vector bundle is determined by its total space.