The Klein Bottle

I have been thinking about the famous Klein bottle (above). To quote a limerick by Leo Moser:

A mathematician named Klein
Thought the Möbius band was divine.
Said he: “If you glue
The edges of two,
You’ll get a weird bottle like mine.”

Just for fun, here is a Game of Life glider on a Klein bottle. The top and bottom of the square are considered to be joined, so as to form a tube. The ends of the tube (vertical sides of the square) are also joined, but with a reversal of orientation (a manoeuvre not really possible in three dimensions). The glider changes colour as it changes orientation.

Video produced using the R animation package.


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1 thought on “The Klein Bottle

  1. Pingback: The Projective Plane | Scientific Gems

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