4 days ago
Monday, February 02, 2015
Möbius Strips: Now Apparently Three-Dimensional
Today I found out about a new paper that reports the generation of Möbius strips of optical polarization, which is very exciting. Unfortunately, the paper's abstract starts out in a very depressing manner that makes me cringe: "Möbius strips are three-dimensional geometrical structures, fascinating for their peculiar property..." Nooooooo!
Although does need three dimensions embed a Möbius strip in an ambient (extrinsic) space, a Möbius strip is a two-dimensional manifold.
(Tip of the cap to Physics Today for their Facebook post of a popular article about the new discovery. Notice the comment about the number of dimensions in the correction. In this case, the popular piece has done better than the paper's abstract.)
Labels:
awesome,
cringeworthy,
errors,
experiments,
geometry,
manifolds,
mathematics,
optics
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