How to see the eight Thurston geometries

Abstract

A manifold is a topological space that is locally Euclidean. Manifolds are important because they arise naturally in a variety of mathematical and physical applications as global objects with simpler local structure. In this paper we propose a technique for immersive visualization of relevant three-dimensional manifolds in the context of the Geometrization conjecture. The algorithm generalizes traditional computer graphics ray tracing. To do so we use several related definitions and results dating back to the works of Poincar\'e, Thurston, and Perelman.