Simplification paths in the Pachner graphs of closed orientable 3-manifold triangulations

It is not known whether there exists a computable function bounding the number of Pachner moves needed to connect any two triangulation of a compact 3-manifold. In this paper we find an explicit bound of this kind for all Haken 3-manifolds which contain no fibred submanifolds as strongly simple pieces of their JSJ-decomposition. The explicit formula for the bound is in terms of the number of tetrahedra in the two triangulations. This implies a conceptually trivial algorithm f...

This survey focuses on the computational complexity of some of the fundamental decision problems in 3-manifold theory. The article discusses the wide variety of tools that are used to tackle these problems, including normal and almost surfaces, hierarchies, homomorphisms to finite groups, and hyperbolic structures.

It is not completely unreasonable to expect that a computable function bounding the number of Pachner moves needed to change any triangulation of a given 3-manifold into any other triangulation of the same 3-manifold exists. In this paper we describe a procedure yielding an explicit formula for such a function if the 3-manifold in question is a Seifert fibred space.

Dimension 4 is the first dimension in which exotic smooth manifold pairs appear -- manifolds which are topologically the same but for which there is no smooth deformation of one into the other. Whilst smooth and triangulated 4-manifolds do coincide, comparatively little work has been done towards gaining an understanding of smooth 4-manifolds from the discrete and algorithmic perspective. In this paper we introduce new software tools to make this possible, including a softwar...

It is known that an ideal triangulation of a compact $3$-manifold with nonempty boundary is minimal if and only if it contains the minimum number of edges among all ideal triangulations of the manifold. Therefore, any ideal one-edge triangulation (i.e., an ideal singular triangulation with exactly one edge) is minimal. Vesnin, Turaev, and the first author showed that an ideal two-edge triangulation is minimal if no $3$-$2$ Pachner move can be applied. In this paper we show th...

In this paper, we describe geometrical constructions to obtain triangulations of connected sums of closed orientable triangulated 3-manifolds. Using these constructions, we show that it takes time polynomial in the number of tetrahedra to check if a closed orientable 3-manifold, equipped with a minimal triangulation, is reducible or not. This result can easily be generalized to compact orientable 3-manifolds with non-empty boundary.

Enumerating all 3-manifold triangulations of a given size is a difficult but increasingly important problem in computational topology. A key difficulty for enumeration algorithms is that most combinatorial triangulations must be discarded because they do not represent topological 3-manifolds. In this paper we show how to preempt bad triangulations by detecting genus in partially-constructed vertex links, allowing us to prune the enumeration tree substantially. The key idea ...

In this survey article, we are interested on minimal triangulations of closed pl manifolds. We present a brief survey on the works done in last 25 years on the following: (i) Finding the minimal number of vertices required to triangulate a given pl manifold. (ii) Given positive integers $n$ and $d$, construction of $n$-vertex triangulations of different $d$-dimensional pl manifolds. (iii) Classifications of all the triangulations of a given pl manifold with same number of ver...

A celebrated result concerning triangulations of a given closed 3-manifold is that any two triangulations with the same number of vertices are connected by a sequence of so-called 2-3 and 3-2 moves. A similar result is known for ideal triangulations of topologically finite non-compact 3-manifolds. These results build on classical work that goes back to Alexander, Newman, Moise, and Pachner. The key special case of 1-vertex triangulations of closed 3-manifolds was independentl...

We describe theoretical backgrounds for a computer program that recognizes all closed orientable 3-manifolds up to complexity 8. The program can treat also not necessarily closed 3-manifolds of bigger complexities, but here some unrecognizable (by the program) 3-manifolds may occur.