IT is an icon of mathematics that is also appreciated in wider culture, but what is the actual shape of a Möbius strip, the one-sided surface famously drawn by the mathematical artist M. C. Escher?
This confounding surface is easy enough to make – simply take a strip of paper, twist it through 180 degrees and tape the ends together to form a kind of twisted loop. The difficult part, until now, was to mathematically define the shape. “The equations are huge, too big to handle – even by a computer,” says Gert van der Heijden, an expert in…
