This has been tested on Mac OS 10.10 and later.

Get the polymake sources (either the latest release, or do a checkout of the perpetual beta, see here for links). If you used a tar ball unpack it and switch into the polymake directory. If you use the perpetual beta, switch into the directory trunk. Now issue

./configure --without-fink

if you use release 3.1 of polymake, and

./configure --without-fink LDFLAGS=' -stdlib=libstdc++' CXXFLAGS=-I/usr/include/c++/4.2.1

for any other release (but not older than 2.14).

If you do not want to install into /usr/local (or you don't have sudo rights), then add

--prefix=$HOME/polymake-install

to configure, where $HOME/polymake-install can be any directory in your $HOME folder.

If you have never used java before you will get a popup window that asks you to install java. Please do so and rerun the above command.

Once this has finished do

make
make install

The first command will take a while. If you have not specified a local directory then the second command should be

sudo make install

This will ask for your password.