Orb is a computer program that can find hyperbolic structures on a large class of hyperbolic 3-orbifolds and 3-manifolds. It can start with a projection of a graph embedded in the 3-sphere, and produce and simplify a triangulation with some prescribed subgraph as part of the 1-skeleton and the remainder of the graph drilled out. It enables computation of hyperbolic structures on knot complements, graph complements and orbifolds whose underlying space is the 3-sphere minus a finite number of points.
A new version of Orb is now available which runs on Mac OS X (with and without intel chips). A version for Linux is also available. The code was created by modifying Jeff Weeks' computer program SnapPea.
Click the following links to download a precompiled version that should run on Mac OS X (versions 10.3 and 10.4)
NEW: The source code below should compile under Mac OS X and on Linux.
(Thanks to Matthias Görner for getting Orb to compile on Linux.)
Orb-1.2.tar.gz (2.8Mb)
The following is a link to Orb's source code:
If you have any questions or comments about Orb, please contact Damian Heard at the e-mail address: Damian 'dot' Heard 'at' gmail 'dotcom'. (Note: the e-mail address is written this way to avoid spam.) A copy of his PhD thesis can be found here. Please note, this pdf file has changed. In the original pdf there were errors in the symmetry groups on pages 71-78.