Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 March 2021
We formulate general conditions which imply that ${\mathcal L}(X,Y)$, the space of operators from a Banach space X to a Banach space Y, has $2^{{\mathfrak {c}}}$ closed ideals, where ${\mathfrak {c}}$ is the cardinality of the continuum. These results are applied to classical sequence spaces and Tsirelson-type spaces. In particular, we prove that the cardinality of the set ofclosed ideals in ${\mathcal L}\left (\ell _p\oplus \ell _q\right )$ is exactly $2^{{\mathfrak {c}}}$ for all $1<p<q<\infty $.