Regina - A Normal Surface Theory Calculator

Regina
A normal surface theory calculator
Copyright © 1999-2009, Ben Burton

Last updated: 28 September 2009
Current version: 4.6
SourceForge

ContentsExtracts from the users' handbook
News
What is Regina?
Screenshots
Download
Documentation
Announcement mailing list
License and acknowledgements
Contact / Comments / Suggestions
What does Regina do?
What's new?
Troubleshooting
Genealogy
Who is Regina?
Other pages
Census data and related articles
Building from source
Deprecation guide (for version 5.0)

News

28 September 2009: Supporting data is now available for the proof that the Weber-Seifert dodecahedral space is non-Haken. See the data page for details.

15 July 2009: Packages are now available for Fedora 11, which was released last month.

16 May 2009: Version 4.6 is out! There are some big changes here: summary and compatibility tabs for normal surfaces, quadrilateral-octagon coordinates, stronger triangulation simplification, cutting along surfaces, much faster enumeration of surfaces in standard coordinates, and more. See the release notes for a full list of new features, optimisations and fixes.

As usual, packages are available in the download section for GNU/Linux and MacOS X.

Special thanks must go to the University of Victoria (BC, Canada) and Ryan Budney for their hospitality and support, without which the list above would certainly be smaller. Thanks also to the University of Melbourne, RMIT University and the Australian Research Council for their continuing support.

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What is Regina?

Regina is a suite of mathematical software for 3-manifold topologists. It focuses upon the study of 3-manifold triangulations and includes support for normal surfaces and angle structures.

See the users' handbook for a full list of features.

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Screenshots

A few screenshots are available. Click on an image to see a full scale version.

Screenshot thumbnail Normal surfaces, angle structures, structural analysis and algebraic properties (taken from version 3.97)
Screenshot thumbnail Skeletal information and other triangulation properties (taken from version 3.95)
Screenshot thumbnail In-built Python scripting (taken from version 3.97)

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Download

Prebuilt packages for Regina are available for several GNU/Linux distributions, as listed in the table below. Please click on the relevant Download link for your system.

To keep the installation simple for regular users, most packages do not include the MPI utilities. If you use these utilities, mail me and hopefully I can build an MPI-enabled package for you.

All of the packages are named regina-normal to avoid conflicting with the other Regina. All of the downloads can also be found on the Regina download site.

Distribution Version 32-bit package (i386 or i586) 64-bit package (amd64 or x86_64)
Debian 5.0 (lenny) Download Download
unstable (sid) Download Download
Fedora 11 Download Download
10 Download Download
9 Download Download
8 Download Download
Fink / MacOS X 10.4 (stable) Instructions, Info File
10.4 / 10.5 (unstable) Instructions, Info File
Mandriva 2009.1 Download Download
2009.0 Download Download
2008.1 Download Download
SuSE 11.1 Download Download
11.0 Download Download
Ubuntu 9.04 (jaunty) Download Download
8.10 (intrepid) Download Download
8.04 LTS (hardy) Download Download

For other platforms or distributions, Regina is available in source form only. These sources are available from the Regina download site. Please see the separate page on building Regina for further information on how to build Regina and what libraries and tools you will need to have installed.

If you are having trouble either compiling or running Regina, you may check the troubleshooting page to see if your problem is discussed there. You are of course also welcome to write to either myself or the users' mailing list regina-user@lists.sourceforge.net for assistance.

Packaging help requested: Is the download page missing your distribution (e.g., Slackware, Gentoo) or your hardware (e.g., Sparc, PowerPC)? If so, and if you're willing to help out with packaging, please visit this page! It may be as easy as rebuilding an RPM on your machine.

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Documentation

Users' Handbook

The Regina Handbook is installed with Regina and can be viewed by selecting Help->Regina Handbook. Note that this requires the KDE Help Centre to be present, although this is provided with most KDE installations.

Alternatively, the handbook can be viewed here online with any web browser. It can also be downloaded separately in HTML format.

API Documentation

There is also extensive API documentation available for the calculation engine. This is useful for Python scripting or for building the Regina calculation engine into your own projects (the calculation engine is provided as a shared library).

If you downloaded Regina as a ready-made package, the API documentation should already be installed (though on some distributions you need the separate package regina-normal-doc). You can access it by selecting Help->Python Reference.

If you are building Regina from sources, the API documentation will be installed as long as you have Doxygen on your system (see the system requirements for details).

Alternatively, the API documentation can be viewed here online with any web browser.

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Announcement Mailing List

A mailing list (regina-announce@lists.sourceforge.net) has been created for important announcements such as new releases of Regina. This list has extremely low traffic. You can subscribe or unsubscribe here.

Other mailing lists have been created for user support and development discussons; see the contact section below.

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License and Acknowledgements

Regina – A normal surface theory calculator
Copyright (c) 1999–2009, Ben Burton

Citation

If you find Regina useful in your research, please consider citing it as you would any other paper that you use. See the help page on citing Regina for a suggested form of reference.

Copying & modification

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.

SnapPea Kernel

Since version 4.2 (July 2005), Regina includes portions of the SnapPea kernel which it uses for certain geometric calculations. SnapPea is copyright (c) 1991–2005 by Jeff Weeks, who has graciously given permission for it to be distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License as described above.

Orb Kernel

Since version 4.3.1 (May 2006), Regina includes snippets of code from Orb for use in importing and exporting files in Orb / Casson format. Orb is based on SnapPea (see above) with additional code written by Damian Heard, who has also given permission for his code to be distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Acknowledgements

Many people have been of assistance with this project, be it through time, knowledge, testing or code. Please see the full list of acknowledgements in the users' handbook.

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Contact / Comments / Suggestions

If you have any suggestions, problems, bugs, wishes, frustrations or otherwise miscellaneous comments, I would really love to hear them. This program is permanently under development and I would like to hear what people want out of it.

Alternatively, if you have written additions yourself and think they could be useful in the general release, I would love to hear about them. The more the merrier! It's probably worth mailing me first though in case I or someone else have already written said addition and it's currently being debugged and two days away from release.

Incidentally, even if you have no comments to make, I'd like to hear from anyone using the program - even if it's just to say hi - mainly because I'm interested to see who's using it and how it's being used.

The best way to contact me is by email at bab@debian.org. But even better, you could use the SourceForge services which include a bug tracking system and mailing lists; this way you can ensure your problems and/or discussions are publicly archived to help others with similar issues.

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