On the cardinality of the manifold set (Q2417663)

This paper considers the cardinality of the set of homeomorphism classes of manifolds homotopy equivalent to a given manifold \(M\). In particular the paper compares this to the cardinality of the surgery structure set of \(M\). The authors use \(\mathcal{ M}(M)\) to denote the cardinality of the set of homeomorphism classes, \(\mathcal{ M}^{s}(M)\) (resp. \(\mathcal{ M}^{s/h}(M)\)) denotes the simple manifold set where one requires a simple homotopy equivalence to \(M\) (resp. the quotient of \(\mathcal{ M}^{s}(M)\) where homeomorphism is replaced by \(h\)-cobordism). \(\mathcal{ S}^{s}(M)\) denotes the set of simple homotopy equivalences to \(M\) up to \(s\)-cobordism. In the simply connected case the authors show that for dimension \(\geq 5\) \(\mathcal{ M}(M)\) is infinite iff \(\mathcal{ S}(M)\) is infinite. In the non-simply connected case results show that \(\mathcal{ M}(M)\) can be of size 1 even though the corresponding \(\mathcal{ S}(M)\) is infinite.