Strong dichotomy of cardinality (Q5937370)

Often classes of objects (e.g. groups) have the property that if their size \(\lambda\) is (infinite) uncountable, then their size is \(2^{\aleph_0}\). This is called (strong) dichotomy. This is particularly interesting in case \(\lambda\) is a strong limit of cofinality \(\omega\) (and e.g. if \(\lambda = \beth_\omega\)), which is central in this investigation. This combinatorial analysis has a very natural algebraic background: Often the \(p\)-ranks (\(p\) a prime or \(0\)) of groups \(\text{Ext} (G,Z)\) (\(Z\) the integers) turn out to be cardinalities of the form \(2^\kappa\). Why? This is a particular case of Theorem 1.1. Results on the number of analytic equivalence relations investigated earlier by Harrington and Shelah, also fall under this new setting. Depending on the case the reader is interested, he can pick a track (Sections 1, 3, 4, 5) finding deep results on those cardinality questions of the Ext-functor or (Sections 2, 5) on cardinality results on analytic equivalence relations.