Home Page For Orb

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 should be available soon. The code was created by modifying Jeff Weeks' computer program SnapPea.

Mac OS X users (10.3 and 10.4)

Click the following links to download a precompiled version that should run on Mac OS X (versions 10.3 and 10.4)

Orb-1.0.zip (4Mb)

orb-beta-0.tar.gz (3.1Mb)
For the source code see below.

Other users

To use Orb on another platform you will need to download and compile the source code. This requires the Qt library (version 3.x) and you can download a version by clicking on the one of the following links:

qt-mac-free-3.3.4.tar.gz (15.5Mb)

qt-x11-free-3.3.4.tar.gz (16.6Mb)

The following is a link to Orb's source code:

Orb-1.0 source.zip (2.3Mb)

orb-beta-0-source.tar.gz (880Kb)
You can compile Orb by following the instructions in README.txt.

Further Information

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 has changed. In the original pdf there were errors in the symmetry groups on pages 71-78.


Last modified: Sat Jun 2 17:00:00 EST 2007

Department of Mathematics | University of Melbourne