Surgery and handle straightening in Hilbert cube manifolds

Abstract

The main result of this paper establishes an infinite dimensional version of the finite-dimensional handle straightening result of Kirby-Siebenmann. In order to do this a procedure is developed for doing surgery on infinite-dimensional manifolds. These results are used elsewhere to prove that every compact Hubert cube manifold can be triangulated and to establish the topological invariance of Whitehead torsion.