A tabulation of 3-manifolds via Dehn surgery (Q2493412)

There are two fundamental problems in the theory of 3-manifolds, that is, the homeomorphism problem and the classification problem. The homeomorphism problem is the problem of giving an effective procedure for determining whether two given 3-manifolds are homeomorphic, and the classification problem is the problem of effectively generating a list containing exactly one 3-manifold from every (unoriented) type of 3-manifolds. In this paper, the author considers the classification problem on closed connected orientable 3-manifolds by establishing an embedding from the set of closed connected orientable 3-manifolds into the set of links in the 3-sphere \(\mathbb S^3\) which is a right inverse of the 0-surgery map. This embedding further induces two embeddings from the set of closed connected orientable 3-manifolds into the well-ordered set of lattice points and into the set of link groups. In particular, the set of closed connected orientable 3-manifolds is a well-ordered set by a well-order inherited from that of the set of lattice points, and the homeomorphism problem on the 3-manifolds can in principle be replaced by the isomorphism problem on the link groups. The definition of the set of lattice points is given as follows. Let \(\mathbb Z\) be the set of integers, and \(\mathbb Z^n\) the product of \(n\) copies of \(\mathbb Z\) whose elements are called lattice points of length \(n\). The set \(\mathbb X\) of lattice points is the disjoint union of \(\mathbb Z^n\) for all \(n \geq 1\). The set \(\mathbb X\) is well-ordered by setting \(x < y\) for any \(x, y \in \mathbb X\) if the length of \(x\) is less than the length of \(y\). To determine the embedded images of every 3-manifold, the author proposes a tabulation program on the well-ordered set of 3-manifolds which can be carried out inductively until a concrete pair of indistinguishable 3-manifolds occurs (if there is such a pair). As an application, he tabulates 3-manifolds corresponding to the lattice points of lengths up to 7.