Constructing Bitwisted Face Pairing 3-Manifolds

Abstract

The bitwist construction, originally discovered by Cannon, Floyd, and Parry, gives us a new method for finding face pairing descriptions of 3-manifolds. In this paper, I will describe the construction in a way suitable for a more general audience than the original research papers. Along the way, I will describe Dehn Surgery and a set of moves which allows us to change the framings of a link without changing the topology of the manifold obtained by Dehn Surgery. Once the theory has been developed, I will apply it to find several bitwist representations of the Poincaré Sphere and 3-Torus. Finally, I discuss how one might attempt to find a set of moves that can take one bitwist representation of a manifold to any other bitwist representation of the same manifold.