[SnapPea-planning] some progress

[Nathaniel Thurston]

Dear All,

I've been exploring the possibility of funding from the Simons  
institute, and with some encouraging noises.

One question has come up concerns the high-level description of  
SnapPea -- from the perspective of a mathematician who doesn't know  
much about topology, or from the perspective of a physicist, it seems  
rather difficult to find out what SnapPea is or what it can do or  
what it's used for.

Here's what I said to my contact at the Simons institute:
---
The best basic documentation on SnapPea I've found is at Nathan  
Dunfield's website, http://www.math.uiuc.edu/~nmd/computop/ .  
Unfortunately, it's very basic.  The source code of SnapPea goes into  
considerable depth, but unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much  
available in between these two extremes.

My main experience with SnapPea comes from my work on GMT ( http:// 
annals.math.princeton.edu/issues/2003/157_2.html ), where we used it  
to "identify" (find a likely but unproven correspondence) the objects  
we discovered during the course of the computer search.  I'm not  
familiar with everything it can do, nor do I currently have all of  
the mathematical background to follow the proofs included with the  
program.

Providing better documentation on SnapPea for the non-specialist  
should be, I think, one of the first goals of the effort.  I'm going  
to ask the discussion group I've started to see if they can help.
----

Would anyone care to improve on what I've said?

Regards,
	Nathaniel

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