Polyhedra dominating finitely many different homotopy types

Abstract

In 1968 K. Borsuk asked: Is it true that every finite polyhedron dominates only finitely many different shapes? In this question the notions of shape and shape domination can be replaced by the notions of homotopy type and homotopy domination. We obtained earlier a negative answer to the Borsuk question and next results that the examples of such polyhedra are not rare. In particular, there exist polyhedra with nilpotent fundamental groups dominating infinitely many different homotopy types. On the other hand, we proved that every polyhedron with finite fundamental group dominates only finitely many different homotopy types. Here we obtain next positive results that the same is true for some classes of polyhedra with Abelian fundamental groups and for nilpotent polyhedra. Therefore we also get that every finitely generated, nilpotent torsion-free group has only finitely many r-images up to isomorphism.