Trees of nuclei and bounds on the number of triangulations of the 3-ball (Q393706)

A difficult (and still open) question in topological combinatorics is the following: does there exist a constant \(c\) such that the number of combinatorially distinct triangulations of the \(3\)-sphere is bounded from above by \(c^n\), where \(n\) is the number of tetrahedra? The same question, where \(n\) is the number of vertices, was answered negatively by \textit{J. Pfeifle} and \textit{G. M. Ziegler} [Math. Ann. 330, No. 4, 829--837 (2004; Zbl 1062.52011)]. An upper bound on the number of spheres also yields an upper bound for the number of balls of the same dimension (e.g., from removing one facet). The authors of the paper under review study a specific method to construct triangulated \(3\)-dimensional balls. As their main result they show that the number of these special triangulations indeed has a single exponential upper bound.