Download or read book Gems, Computers, and Attractors for 3-manifolds written by S¢stenes Lins and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 1995 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about dealing with 3-manifolds using computers. Its emphasis is on presenting algorithms which are used for solving (in practice) the homeomorphism problem for the smallest of these objects. The key concept is the 3-gem, a special kind of edge-colored graph, which encodes the manifold via a ball complex. Passages between 3-gems and more standard presentations like Heegaard diagrams and surgery descriptions are provided. A catalogue of all closed orientable 3-manifolds induced by 3-gems up to 30 vertices is included. In order to help the classification, various invariants are presented, including the new quantum invariants.