Polymake
by Michael Joswig and Ewgenij Gawrilow is a highly flexible software system
which is used by researchers in geometry to investigate geometric and
combinatorial properties of convex polytopes. As a key feature it offers a
wide variety of interfaces to other programs, which greatly enlarges the
capabilities of the system. For visualization purposes the system primarily
relies on JavaView.
This geometry has been generated with polymake. "Typical"
3-polytope in the following sense: let P be the convex hull of random points
on the unit sphere in 3-space. Then its dual P' is almost always
simple. Now let P'' be the convex hull of the vertices of P' minus a few
(which again are chosen at random). Such a P'' is what you see here.
It is neither simplicial nor simple.
Polymake is a hybrid system where C++ client components interact with a Perl
server. Interfaces to external programs are usually done in Perl; JavaView
is no exception. Polymake produces a JVX file with a description of the
geometry which is then passed to JavaView via a system() command line call.
