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.

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.

A family of coordinates h for the Teichmller space of a compact surface with boundary was introduced by the second author. Mondello showed that the coordinate 0 can be used to produce a natural cell decomposition of the Teichmller space, invariant under the action of the mapping class group. In this paper, we show that, for any h 0, the coordinate h produces a natural cell decomposition of the Teichmller space.

Suppose that <i></i>₀ is an unknotted simple closed curve contained in the 3-sphere which happens to be invariant under a subgroup <i>G</i> of the Mbius group of <i>S³</i> = the group (generated by inversions in 2-spheres). It is shown that there is an equivariant isotopy <i></i>_<i>t</i>, 0 <i>t</i> 1, from <i></i>₀ to a round circle <i></i>₁.