[SnapPea-planning] priorities

[Nathaniel Thurston]

I'm thinking that for the medium- and long- term requests, rather than  
actually writing the code
(which may be more than will get funded in most cases), it might be  
better to document (publicly) what's
desired, and how one might go about writing the desired code.  Two  
benefits:
	* even if the work isn't done, it's a place to find student projects.
	* getting multiple minds thinking about this stuff may reveal an  
easier/better way to solve it that is at first apparent.
In any case, it seems like a good preliminary step which should be  
taken in advance of coding.

The list is pretty ambitious, and I like the notion of making it even  
more so.  If we record what we want, it's just possible that we might  
be able to do it...

--Nathaniel

On 27 Apr 2009, at 17:22, Bill Thurston wrote:

> Nathaniel et All,
> 	That's a nice list---any signficant progress on this would be great!
> 	Another long-term item, but probably not for this list, which is  
> already very ambitious: more systematic treatment of various kinds  
> of incompressible surfaces. This goes hand-in-hand with dealing with  
> non-hyperbolic manifolds (as snappea already reports in the case of  
> suspected spheres, disks, annuli, etc.) but there are other cases  
> that are natural.
> 	In addition (long-term project): a way to systematically handle  
> manifolds with higher-genus boundary, and to compute hyperbolic  
> structures of infinite volume, perhaps by capping them off in  
> standard ways (e.g., gluing on handlebodies as higher-genus  
> fillings,  choosing a maximal family of curves to make parabolic, or  
> even finding a way to apply the uniformization theory).
> 	I don't know anything about Sage, but I suppose a major goal should  
> be to have a robust and simple system for extensions and plugins as  
> well as for export and import of descriptions of manifolds and  
> geometry. It would be especially wonderful if it didn't require  
> substantial technical experience in programming to contribute a  
> useful extension.
> 	Bill
> On Apr 27, 2009, at 5:21 AM, Nathaniel Thurston wrote:
>
>> Dear All,
>>
>> I've been in contact with Michael Douglas at the Simons Institute (is
>> that the right name?), and he's suggested that the institute would
>> have funding for at least a month's work and asked me to determine  
>> the
>> relative priority of the work to be done.  I examined the mailing  
>> list
>> history, and came up with the this outline:
>>
>> 1. finish tcl port (cross-platform graphics; test for mac osx & linux
>> compatibility)
>> 2. sage interface
>> 3. more robust Dirchlet domain algorithm
>> 4. requests (grouped by estimated effort required, and ordered by  
>> time
>> of request)
>> 	a. short-term
>> 		identify dehn-drilling axes in viewer [Bill Thurston]
>> 	b. medium-term
>> 		good drillings view [Bill Thurston]
>> 		integrated hyberbolic viewer [Bill Thurston]
>> 		symbolic math for smith normal form [Marc Culler]
>> 		direct computation of Chern-Simons invariant [Marc Culler]
>> 		more robust generator of short geodesics [Dylan Thurston]
>> 	c. long-term
>> 		looking for supergroups of finite index [Bill Thurston]
>> 		detriangulate command: manifold -> link complement [Bill Thurston]
>> 		dealing with non-hyperbolic manifolds [Dylan Thurston]
>> 		rewrite snap in sage [Nathan Dunfield]
>>
>> Would anyone like to amend this list before I send it out to the
>> SnapPea-summary mailing list?
>>
>> Best Regards,
>> 	Nathaniel
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