Differential Geometry – Number of Differentiable Structures on a Smooth Manifold

differential-geometrydifferential-topologysmooth-manifolds

On John Lee's book, Introduction to Smooth Manifolds, I stumbled upon the next problem (problem 1.6):

Let $M$ be a nonempty topological manifold of dimension $n \geq 1$. If $M$ has a smooth structure, show that it has uncountably many distinct ones.

The trick in this exercise was to use the function $F_s(x) = |x|^{s-1}x$, where $s \in \mathbb{R}$ and $s>0$. This function defines an homeomorphism from $\mathbb{B}^n$ to itself, and is a diffeomorphism iff $s=1$.

Now, reading Loring W. Tu's book, An Introduction to Manifolds, he writes:

"It is known that in dimension $< 4$ every topological manifold has a unique differentiable structure and in dimension $>4$ every compact topological manifold has a finite number of differentiable structures. […]"

Can someone help me explain how this last "known fact" and problem 1.6 in Lee's book don't contradict each other?

Thanks in advance

Best Answer

The distinction to be made is that a differentiable structure is a choice of maximal smooth atlas $\mathcal A$, but two different choices $\mathcal A$ and $\mathcal A'$ can lead to isomorphic smooth structures. As an example, the canonical smooth structure $\mathcal A$ on $\mathbb R$ that contains the smooth function ${\rm id}:\mathbb R\longrightarrow \mathbb R$ is isomorphic to the smooth structure $\mathcal A'$ that contains the smooth function $x\mapsto x^3$, although $\mathcal A'\neq \mathcal A$. Thus, although a manifold admits uncountably many different smooth structures, it may have finitely many isomorphism classes of such structures.