Amenable category of three-manifolds (Q1948302)

Recall that a group \(G\) is defined to be amenable if it has a finite additive left-invariant probabilistic measure. Given a \(CW\) space \(X\), a subset \(W\) of \(X\) is defined to be amenable in \(X\) if, for any basepoint \(*\in W\), the image of \(\pi_1(W,*)\to \pi_1(X,*)\) is amenable. Define the amenable category of \(X\) to be the smallest number of open amenable in \(X\) subsets of \(X\) that cover \(X\). Clearly, the amenable category of \(X\) does not exceed the non-normalized Lusternik-Schnirelmann category of \(X\). The authors characterize all closed 3-dimensional manifolds of amenable category 1, 2, 3, and so describe the amenable category of closed 3-manifolds.