Two special cases of Ganea's conjecture

Ganea conjectured that for any finite CW complex and any , . In this paper we prove two special cases of this conjecture. The main result is the following. Let be a -connected -dimensional CW complex (not necessarily finite). We show that if and (which implies ), then . This is proved by showing that in a much larger range, and then showing that under the conditions imposed, . The second special case is an extension of Singhof's earlier result for manifolds.