All the shapes of spaces: a census of small 3-manifolds

A {\em blink} is a plane graph with a bipartition (black, gray) of its edges. Subtle classes of blinks are in 1-1 correspondence with closed, oriented and connected 3-manifolds up to orientation preserving homeomorphisms \cite{lins2013B}. Switching black and gray in a blink $B$, giving $-B$, reverses the manifold orientation. The dual of the blink $B$ in the sphere $\mathbb{S}^2$ is denoted by $B^ \star$. Blinks $B$ and $-B^\star$ induce the same 3-manifold. The paper reinfor...

Through computer enumeration with the aid of topological results, we catalogue all 18 closed non-orientable P^2-irreducible 3-manifolds that can be formed from at most eight tetrahedra. In addition we give an overview as to how the 100 resulting minimal triangulations are constructed. Observations and conjectures are drawn from the census data, and future potential for the non-orientable census is discussed. Some preliminary nine-tetrahedron results are also included.

We describe an algorithm which has enabled us to give a complete list, without repetitions, of all closed oriented irreducible 3-manifolds of complexity up to 9. More interestingly, we have actually been able to give a "name" to each such manifold, by recognizing its canonical decomposition into Seifert fibred spaces and hyperbolic manifolds. The algorithm relies on the extension of Matveev's theory of complexity to the case of manifolds bounded by suitably marked tori, and...

Starting from the (apparently) elementary problem of deciding how many different topological spaces can be obtained by gluing together in pairs the faces of an octahedron, we will describe the central role played by hyperbolic geometry within three-dimensional topology. We will also point out the striking difference with the two-dimensional case, and we will review some of the results of the combinatorial and computational approach to three-manifolds developed by different ma...

Given an special type of triangulation $T$ for an oriented closed 3-manifold $M^3$ we produce a framed link in $S^3$ which induces the same $M^3$ by an algorithm of complexity $O(n^2)$ where $n$ is the number of tetrahedra in $T$ . The special class is formed by the duals of the {\em solvable gems}. These are in practice computationaly easy to obtain from any triangulation for $M^3$. The conjecture that each closed oriented 3-manifold is induced by a solvable gem has been ver...

In this survey on combinatorial properties of triangulated manifolds we discuss various lower bounds on the number of vertices of simplicial and combinatorial manifolds. Moreover, we give a list of all known examples of vertex-minimal triangulations.

The present paper follows the computational approach to 3-manifold classification via edge-coloured graphs, already performed by several authors with respect to orientable 3-manifolds up to 28 coloured tetrahedra, non-orientable 3-manifolds up to 26 coloured tetrahedra, genus two 3-manifolds up to 34 coloured tetrahedra: in fact, by automatic generation and analysis of suitable edge-coloured graphs, called crystallizations, we obtain a catalogue of all orientable 3-manifolds ...

It is well known that a three dimensional (closed, connected and compact) manifold is obtained by identifying boundary faces from a polyhedron P. The study of (\partial P)/~, the boundary \partial P with the polygonal faces identified in pairs leads us to the following conclusion: either a three dimensional manifold is homeomorphic to a sphere or to a polyhedron P with its boundary faces identified in pairs so that (\partial P)/~ is a finite number of internally flat complexe...

We call a 3-manifold Platonic if it can be decomposed into isometric Platonic solids. Generalizing an earlier publication by the author and others where this was done in case of the hyperbolic ideal tetrahedron, we give a census of hyperbolic Platonic manifolds and all of their Platonic tessellations. For the octahedral case, we also identify which manifolds are complements of an augmented knotted trivalent graph and give the corresponding link. A (small version of) the Plato...

In this paper we generate and systematically classify all prime planar knotoids with up to 5 crossings. We also extend the existing list of knotoids in $S^2$ and add all knotoids with 6 crossings.