Some remarks on the uniqueness of decomposition into Cartesian product (Q5963952)

A decomposition of a topological space into a Cartesian product of prime factors is not unique, in general. The authors give sufficient conditions on the factors for the uniqueness of the decomposition to hold without any dimensional restrictions. The main tool is based on the concept of homotopically stable and labile points. A continuous map \(h: X\times I\to X\) is a homotopic deformation if \(h(x,0)=x\) for every \(x\in X\). Let \(S(X)\) and \(R(X)\) denote the set of all stable points of \(X\) and the set of all labile points of \(X\), respectively. Here a point \(x\in X\) is stable if for every homotopic deformation \(h\) of \(X\), \(h(x,1)=x\), and it is labile if for every \(y\in X\), there exists a homotopic deformation \(h\) of \(X\) such that \(h(x,1)=y\). The main result of the paper is that every topological space \(X\) can be decomposed into the Cartesian product \(Y\times Z\) such that \(S(Y)=Y\) and \(R(Z)\neq\emptyset\), and this decomposition is unique. Moreover, it is shown that the condition \(R(Z)\neq\emptyset\) holds if \(Z\) is a pathwise connected normal space that contains a point with a compact ANR-neighborhood.