TITLE: Are there non-compact, non-smoothable manifolds?
QUESTION [12 upvotes]: There do exist manifolds which do not admit any smooth structure at all. But the only examples I've heard of are all compact.

Are there any non-compact, non-smoothable manifolds?

REPLY [30 votes]: The Cairns-Hirsch theorem says that a PL manifold $M$ is smoothable if and only if $M\times \mathbb{R}$ is smoothable, so you can take $M$ to be any one of the known compact, PL examples such as Kervaire's manifold and then $M\times\mathbb{R}^n$ is non-smoothable for $n \geq 1$.