WE CONSIDER Haken manifolds M. That is three manifolds which are compact, irreducible, orientable, and sufficiently 1arge. S 8M may or may not be empty. This class of 3-manifolds shares many properties with closed surfaces (# S2 or RP2). On an algebraic level, both are examples of K (T, 1)s. More geometrically the hierarchy structure of a Haken manifold [9] is analogous to a sequence of cuts turning a surface into a disk. With the aid of minimal surfaces we are able to find a sufficiently natural hierarchy to establish a new similarity between Haken manifolds and surfaces. Our main theorem is:

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We propose a finite-dimensional variational principle on triangulated 3-manifolds so that its critical points are related to solutions to Thurstons gluing equation and Hakens normal surface equation. The action functional is the volume.

We give a brief summary of some of our work and our joint work with Stephan Tillmann on solving Thurstons equation and Haken equation on triangulated 3-manifolds in this paper. Several conjectures on the existence of solutions to Thurstons equation and Haken equation are made. Resolutions of these conjecture will lead to a new proof of the Poincar conjecture without using the Ricci flow. We approach these conjectures by a finite dimensional variational principle so that its critical points are related to solutions to Thurstons gluing equation and Hakens normal surface equation. The action functional is the volume. This is a generalization of an earlier program by Casson and Rivin for compact 3-manifolds with torus boundary.

We give a brief introduction to some of the recent works on finding geometric structures on triangulated surfaces using variational principles.