A Cheeger-type exponential bound for the number of triangulated manifolds (Q784851)

An intrinsic simplicial complex is a collection of simplices in a length metric space, so that the simplices are attached along isometries of their faces and combinatorially form a simplicial complex. A triangulation \(K\) of a Riemannian manifold \(M\) is called geometric if \(K\) is an intrinsic simplicial complex and its simplices are convex sets in \(M\). Cheeger's finiteness theorem (see [\textit{J. Cheeger}, Lect. Notes Math. 1504, 1--38 (1991; Zbl 0771.53015)]) states that there are only finitely many diffeomorphism types of space forms (Riemannian manifolds of constant sectional curvature) with bounded geometry: curvature and volume bounded below, and diameter bounded above. In this article, the authors present a discrete analogue of Cheeger's theorem. They prove that in terms of the number of facets, there are exponentially many geometric triangulations of space forms with bounded geometry and fixed dimension. They also show that with \(N\) facets (i) there are at most \(2^{d^{\hspace{.2mm}2}\times ((d+1)!)^2\times N}\) distinct combinatorial types of geometric triangulations of the standard \(S^{\hspace{.2mm}d}\), (ii) there are at most \(2^{d^{\hspace{.2mm}2}\times (d+1)!\times N}\) distinct combinatorial types of geometric triangulations of convex balls in \(\mathbb{R}^d\), and (iii) there are at most \(2^{d^{\hspace{.2mm}2}\times ((d+1)!)^{d-2}\times N}\) distinct combinatorial types of geometric triangulations of star-shaped balls in \(\mathbb{R}^d\).