A mathematician confided
That a Möbius strip is one-sided.
You’ll get quite a laugh
If you cut it in half,
For it stays in one piece when divided.
A Möbius strip is made by giving a strip of paper a half-twist and then gluing or taping the ends together. Even though it looks like it has two sides and two edges, a curious feature of a Möbius strip is that it is one-sided and one-edged. If you were holding Figure 1, and you traced with your fingertip the dashed line around the entire surface, you would end up exactly where you began. Your fingertip traverses both “sides,” without crossing an edge.
Let’s say there’s a solid Möbius strip big enough for you to walk around. Again, you would end up where you began, and with your left-right orientation reversed. This is an exercise highly recommended for liberals and conservatives! 🙂
Figure 2 below shows what happens if you follow the instructions in the limerick.
Aside for its aesthetic and topological appeal, the strip also has technical applications. Conveyor belts in the form of a Möbius strip wear evenly on both “sides” whereas an ordinary belt would wear out on one side. Ditto for continuous-loop recording tapes.
The word Möbius derives from its discoverer, August Ferdinand Möbius (1790-1868), a German mathematician.
See pictures below of Möbius strip (Figure 1) and the strip cut in half (Figure 2).
I’m not sure who the author of the limerick is. When I determine that, I will include it in this Blague. Ditto for attribution of the two images.
HyC