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

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 ...

This article presents a survey of some recent results in the theory of spatial graphs. In particular, we highlight results related to intrinsic knotting and linking and results about symmetries of spatial graphs. In both cases we consider spatial graphs in $S^3$ as well as in other $3$-manifolds.

Early last century witnessed both the complete classification of 2-dimensional manifolds and a proof that classification of 4-dimensional manifolds is undecidable, setting up 3-dimensional manifolds as a central battleground of topology to this day. A rather important subset of the 3-manifolds has turned out to be the knotspaces, the manifolds left when a thin tube around a knot in 3D space is excised. Given a knot diagram it would be desirable to provide as compact a descrip...

From a pseudo-triangulation with $n$ tetrahedra $T$ of an arbitrary closed orientable connected 3-manifold (for short, {\em a 3D-space}) $M^3$, we present a gem $J '$, inducing $\IS^3$, with the following characteristics: (a) its number of vertices is O(n); (b) it has a set of $p$ pairwise disjoint couples of vertices $\{u_i,v_i\}$, each named {\em a twistor}; (c) in the dual $(J ')^\star$ of $J '$ a twistor becomes a pair of tetrahedra with an opposite pair of edges in commo...

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.

This paper poses some basic questions about instances (hard to find) of a special problem in 3-manifold topology. "Important though the general concepts and propositions may be with the modern industrious passion for axiomatizing and generalizing has presented us...nevertheless I am convinced that the special problems in all their complexity constitute the stock and the core of mathematics; and to master their difficulty requires on the whole the harder labor." Hermann Weyl 1...

This paper investigates a real-valued topological invariant of 3-manifolds called topological volume. For a given 3-manifold M it is defined as the smallest volume of the complement of a (possibly empty) hyperbolic link in M. Various refinements of this invariant are given, asymptotically tight upper and lower bounds are determined, and all non-hyperbolic closed 3-manifolds with topological volume of at most 3.07 are classified. Moreover, it is shown that for all but finitely...

In this paper we enumerate and classify the ``simplest'' pairs (M,G) where M is a closed orientable 3-manifold and G is a trivalent graph embedded in M. To enumerate the pairs we use a variation of Matveev's definition of complexity for 3-manifolds, and we consider only (0,1,2)-irreducible pairs, namely pairs (M,G) such that any 2-sphere in M intersecting G transversely in at most 2 points bounds a ball in M either disjoint from G or intersecting G in an unknotted arc. To c...

This paper presents, with explanatory details, the handle decompositions, fundamental groups and homology groups of 3-manifolds, including some knot complements. Hence, along this paper, when the word manifold appears it is implicit that its dimension is 3, except when explicitly generalized for n dimensions, n natural. The results were obtained for: 3-torus, projective space P^3, trefoil (3^1), figure-eight (4^1), cinquefoil (5^1) and three-twist (5^2).

We introduce a representation of compact 3-manifolds without spherical boundary components via (regular) 4-colored graphs, which turns out to be very convenient for computer aided study and tabulation. Our construction is a direct generalization of the one given in the eighties by S. Lins for closed 3-manifolds, which is in turn dual to the earlier construction introduced by Pezzana's school in Modena. In this context we establish some results concerning fundamental groups, c...