exotic differentiable structures on manifolds in dimensions 5 and 6 It's a result of low-dimensional topology that in dimensions 3 and lower, two manifolds are homeomorphic if and only if they are diffeomorphic. Milnor's 7-spheres give nice counterexamples to this result in dimension 7, and exotic $\mathbb{R}^4$'s give nice counterexamples in dimension 4. But I don't know about dimensions 5 and 6. Is the result true or false in dimensions 5 and 6? And, if false, what are some classic counterexamples, and do stronger constraints -- say compactness or closedness -- happen to make it true?
 A: It is false in dimension 5 and 6. Spheres happen to be standard, but some other (compact and closed) manifolds happen to admit different smooth (and PL) structures.
Simple example are tori. For example, $\mathbb T^5$ admits 3 different PL structures that give rise to 3 different differentiable structures. See, e.g., Hsiang, Shaneson "Fake tori" or Wall's book on surgery.
A: Any PL-manifold of dimension $\le 7$ is smoothable, and the smooth structure is unique in dimensions $5,6$. See e.g. remark 6.7 in   Rudyak's paper for details.
EDIT: To explain the above, the smooth structures on a PL manifold $M$ of dimension $\ge 5$ are in 1-1 correspondence with $[M, PL/O]$, homotopy classes of maps from $M$ to the space $PL/O$, which is $6$-connected. This implies the claim in the previous paragraph. Similarly, PL structures on a topological  manifold $M$ of dimension $\ge 5$ are in 1-1 correspondnece with $[M,TOP/PL]$, and $TOP/PL$ is $K(\mathbb Z_2,3)$. Thus $[M,TOP/PL]$ is simply $H^3(M;\mathbb Z_2)$, the third cohomology group with $\mathbb Z_2$ coefficients, and if $H^3(M;\mathbb Z_2)$ is nonzero, then $M$ admits more than one PL structure. See Madsen-Milgram "Classifying spaces for surgery and cobordism of manifolds".
