We study the degree of an L-Lipschitz map between Riemannian manifolds, proving new upper bounds and constructing new examples. For instance, if
$X_k$
is the connected sum of k copies of
$\mathbb CP^2$
for
$k \ge 4$
, then we prove that the maximum degree of an L-Lipschitz self-map of
$X_k$
is between
$C_1 L^4 (\log L)^{-4}$
and
$C_2 L^4 (\log L)^{-1/2}$
. More generally, we divide simply connected manifolds into three topological types with three different behaviors. Each type is defined by purely topological criteria. For scalable simply connected n-manifolds, the maximal degree is
$\sim L^n$
. For formal but nonscalable simply connected n-manifolds, the maximal degree grows roughly like
$L^n (\log L)^{-\theta (1)}$
. And for nonformal simply connected n-manifolds, the maximal degree is bounded by
$L^\alpha $
for some
$\alpha < n$
.