You have most likely encountered one-sided objects hundreds of times in your daily life – like the universal symbol for recycling, found printed on the backs of aluminum cans and plastic bottles. This ...

You have most likely encountered one-sided objects hundreds of times in your daily life—like the universal symbol for recycling, found printed on the backs of aluminum cans and plastic bottles. This ...

In 1977, two mathematicians created a conjecture that proposed the minimum size a paper strip needed to be in order to form an embedded strip. Although they proposed an aspect ration of 1.73 (or √3), ...

Imagine holding a strip of paper. You give it a half-twist and then tape its ends together. The shape you’re now holding is ...

You have most likely encountered one-sided objects hundreds of times in your daily life – like the universal symbol for recycling, found printed on the backs of aluminum cans and plastic bottles. This ...

Editor’s Note: Published in 1957, this article comes from Martin Gardner’s legendary Scientific American column Mathematical Games. Read more in our special digital issue, Fun and Games. As many ...

Möbius strips are curious mathematical objects. To construct one of these single-sided surfaces, take a strip of paper, twist it once and then tape the ends together. Making one of these beauties is ...

There’s more than one way to slice a bagel. Science News sponsorship position. A bagel (or a doughnut) can serve as a physical model for a mathematical surface called a torus. You can slice it ...

Twisting the light away: Schematic representation of an optical Möbius strip with three half-twists. The blue sticks and balls show the instantaneous direction of the polarization and the black ...

New research presents a strategy for observing and manipulating the optical Berry phase in Möbius ring microcavities. In their paper, the authors discuss how an optical Berry phase can be generated ...