On the concrete construction of hyperbolic structures of 3-manifolds (Q1070583)

In his famous lectures on the geometry and topology of 3-manifolds, W. Thurston constructed a hyperbolic structure on the figure eight knot complement by gluing together the 2-faces of two ideal hyperbolic 3- simplices. The author extends Thurston's technique to cover other knot complements and compact 3-manifolds. A nice triangulation of a 3-manifold M is defined to be a representation of M as the result of pairwise gluing 2-faces of a finite set of 3-simplices and deletion (small regular neighborhoods of) all vertices. It is shown that every compact 3-manifold with non-empty boundary admits nice triangulations. Two practical methods to construct nice triangulations of 3-manifolds are described. One method applies to link complements and starts off with the link diagrams; the second applies to compact 3-manifolds with non-empty boundary and starts with Heegaard diagrams. The author demonstrates how to combine these methods with the technique of ideal hyperbolic simplices to obtain (complete) hyperbolic structures on 3-manifolds. An impressive amount of examples is presented.