We show a rigidity theorem for the Seiberg–Witten invariants mod 2 for families of spin 4-manifolds. A mechanism of this rigidity theorem also gives a family version of 10/8-type inequality. As an application, we prove the existence of non-smoothable topological families of 4-manifolds whose fiber, base space, and total space are smoothable as manifolds. These non-smoothable topological families provide new examples of $4$-manifolds $M$ for which the inclusion maps $\operatorname {Diff}(M) \hookrightarrow \operatorname {Homeo}(M)$ are not weak homotopy equivalences. We shall also give a new series of non-smoothable topological actions on some spin $4$-manifolds.

We consider Hölder continuous cocycles over an accessible partially hyperbolic system with values in the group of diffeomorphisms of a compact manifold $\mathcal {M}$ . We obtain several results for this setting. If a cocycle is bounded in $C^{1+\gamma }$ , we show that it has a continuous invariant family of $\gamma $ -Hölder Riemannian metrics on $\mathcal {M}$ . We establish continuity of a measurable conjugacy between two cocycles assuming bunching or existence of holonomies for both and pre-compactness in $C^0$ for one of them. We give conditions for existence of a continuous conjugacy between two cocycles in terms of their cycle weights. We also study the relation between the conjugacy and holonomies of the cocycles. Our results give arbitrarily small loss of regularity of the conjugacy along the fiber compared to that of the holonomies and of the cocycle.

We prove completeness for the main examples of infinite-dimensional Lie groups and some related topological groups. Consider a sequence $G_{1}\subseteq G_{2}\subseteq \cdots \,$ of topological groups $G_{n}$ n such that $G_{n}$ is a subgroup of $G_{n+1}$ and the latter induces the given topology on $G_{n}$, for each $n\in \mathbb{N}$. Let $G$ be the direct limit of the sequence in the category of topological groups. We show that $G$ induces the given topology on each $G_{n}$ whenever $\cup _{n\in \mathbb{N}}V_{1}V_{2}\cdots V_{n}$ is an identity neighbourhood in $G$ for all identity neighbourhoods $V_{n}\subseteq G_{n}$. If, moreover, each $G_{n}$ is complete, then $G$ is complete. We also show that the weak direct product $\oplus _{j\in J}G_{j}$ is complete for each family $(G_{j})_{j\in J}$ of complete Lie groups $G_{j}$. As a consequence, every strict direct limit $G=\cup _{n\in \mathbb{N}}G_{n}$ of finite-dimensional Lie groups is complete, as well as the diffeomorphism group $\text{Diff}_{c}(M)$ of a paracompact finite-dimensional smooth manifold $M$ and the test function group $C_{c}^{k}(M,H)$, for each $k\in \mathbb{N}_{0}\cup \{\infty \}$ and complete Lie group $H$ modelled on a complete locally convex space.

The group of ${\mathcal{C}}^{1}$ -diffeomorphisms of any sparse Cantor subset of a manifold is countable and discrete (possibly trivial). Thompson’s groups come out of this construction when we consider central ternary Cantor subsets of an interval. Brin’s higher-dimensional generalizations $nV$ of Thompson’s group $V$ arise when we consider products of central ternary Cantor sets. We derive that the ${\mathcal{C}}^{2}$ -smooth mapping class group of a sparse Cantor sphere pair is a discrete countable group and produce this way versions of the braided Thompson groups.