Thrice-punctured sphere (source code)

= Thrice-punctured sphere

The sphere with three points removed is an orientable noncompact surface of genus zero with three ends. It can be realized by pairing the two sides at each of two opposite ideal vertices of an <ideal hyperbolic quadrilateral> in the <hyperbolic disk>. The four ideal vertices fall into three equivalence classes; after adding these three points the cell structure has one face, two edges and three vertices, hence <Euler characteristic> two. Removing these added vertices recovers the original quotient.