In a paper I am in the process of writing in LaTeX, I need to draw and incorporate some diagrams of hyperbolic surfaces in my LaTeX document. Is there any software I can use to draw hyperbolic surfaces, either closed, or with boundaries or punctures ? Are there any such freely downloadable softwares that I can use to draw such diagrams ? Please let me know if you know one. I apologize if this is off-topic. Thank you !
[Math] Softwares for drawing hyperbolic surfaces , closed, with boundaries or with punctures
hyperbolic-geometrymathematical-softwareriemann-surfacessoft-question
Related Solutions
This is my short list of math related software not used for computing. I made an effort to list software in descending order with respect to the frequency of use. I left out $\TeX$ and my version control system of choice CVS since OP was not interested in those.
A good editor. My choice goes to nvi.
A spell checker like ispell.
Regular expressions for pattern matching/search.
Make utility.
I do not know about you guys but for us who must teach and manage grade books nothing comes close to being as useful as awk.
A good file synchronizer like Unison.
Shell script(sh).
sed.
An e-mail client like mailx.
PostScript language as a page description language for printing but also a tool for teaching geometry classes. Obviously you must have PostScript interpreter on your computer like GhostScript (comes with a viewer) and a good PS manipulation tool like psutils.
A tool for manipulation of PDF files. I like Pdftk.
Python as a glue language and for instance its library Matplotlib for making illustrations.
A good image processing tool like Graphics Magic.
Vectorial drawing program as Xfig.
The solutions that people have mentioned are good if you are happy with a two-dimensional line drawing. It would be better to have three-dimensional equations that could be plotted using Maple, or something like that, but that seems to be surprisingly hard. The equation
$$ 3x_3^2x_4-2(x_1^2+x_2^2)x_4-2x_4^3+2(x_1^2-x_2^2)x_3 = 0 $$
defines a highly symmetric surface of genus 2 embedded in $S^3$, and one can project stereographically into $\mathbb{R}^3$ to get a nice picture like this:
(There's a lot to be said about this example; I will have an undergraduate working on it over the summer.) However, I do not know similarly nice equations for surfaces of higher genus, or with the two tori in the same plane rather than at right angles, or with cusps.
Best Answer
Recently, Dani Calegargi put together a program called wireframe for this purpose. It is documented here and available here. Playing around with it, it seems to work pretty well.