The Weber-Seifert dodecahedral space is non-Haken

Abstract

In this paper we settle Thurston’s old question of whether the Weber-Seifert dodecahedral space is non-Haken, a problem that has been a benchmark for progress in computational 3–manifold topology over recent decades. We resolve this question by combining recent significant advances in normal surface enumeration, new heuristic pruning techniques, and a new theoretical test that extends the seminal work of Jaco and Oertel.