We consider a volume maximization program to construct hyperbolic structures on triangulated 3-manifolds, for which previous progress has lead to consider angle assignments which do not correspond to a hyperbolic metric on each simplex. We show that critical points of the generalized volume are associated to geometric structures modeled on the extended hyperbolic space-the natural extension of hyperbolic space by the de Sitter space-except for the degenerate case where all simplices are Euclidean in a generalized sense.

We define a new combinatorial class of triangulations of closed 3-manifolds, satisfying a weak version of 0-efficiency combined with a weak version of minimality, and study them using twisted squares. As an application, we obtain strong restrictions on the topology of a 3-manifold from the existence of non-smooth maxima of the volume function on the space of circle-valued angle structures.

Given an open disc D 2 with a Lorentz metric g, we are interested in finding a conformal embedding of (D

We give a characterization of the action of the mapping class group on Thurston's space of measured laminations.

Fundamental group is one of the most important topological invariants for general manifolds, which can be directly used as manifolds classification. In this work, we provide a series of practical and efficient algorithms to compute fundamental groups for general 3-manifolds based on CW cell decomposition. The input is a tetrahedral mesh, while the output is symbolic representation of its first fundamental group. We further simplify the fundamental group representation using computational algebraic method. We present the theoretical arguments of our algorithms, elaborate the algorithms with a number of examples, and give the analysis of their computational complexity.