<![CDATA[wireframe, a tool for drawing surfaces]]>The purpose of this brief blog post is to advertise that I wrote a little piece of software called wireframe which can be used to quickly and easily produce .eps figures of surface for inclusion in papers. The main use is that one can specify a graph in an ASCII file, and the program will then render a nice 3d picture of a surface obtained as the boundary of a tubular neighborhood of the graph. The software can be downloaded from my github repository at

https://github.com/dannycalegari/wireframe 

and then compiled on any unix machine running X-windows (e.g. linux, mac OSX) with “make”.

The program is quite rudimentary, but I believe it should be useful even in its current state. Users are strenuously encouraged to tinker with it, modify it, improve it, etc. If you use the program and find it useful (or not), please let me know.

A couple of examples of output (which can be created in about 5 minutes) are:

braid_iso

and

punct

(added Feb. 20, 2013): I couldn’t resist; here’s another example:

hand

(update April 12, 2013:) Scott Taylor used wireframe to produce a nice figure of a handlebody (in 3-space) having the Kinoshita graph as a spine. He kindly let me post his figure here, as an example. Thanks Scott!

KinoshitaHandlebody

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