Though perhaps too neat a metaphor, it’s interesting to note that these two men arrived at the same conclusion, from different directions, at the same time. Johann Benedict Listing, a younger mathematician, coined the term “ topology” for the study of surfaces, and in conducting that research, independently determined the properties of the Möbius strip. August Ferdinand Möbius was a mathematician and theoretical astronomer (and also the first to introduce “homogenous coordinates” into “projective geometry”). The Möbius strip was independently discovered by two German mathematicians in 1858. Orientability can be defined as “a continuous choice of local orientation.” A more colloquial explanation: “a space is orientable if you can choose ‘inward’ and ‘outward’ or ‘up’ and ‘down’ directions at every point on the surface that are compatible: you will never accidentally end up at the same point but with ‘up’ flipped to ‘down.’” The unorientable quality of the Möbius strip is perhaps its most distinctive. ‘Time passes.’ ‘That’s how it goes,’ Aureliano admitted, ‘but not so much.’” An exchange between two family members illustrates this central theme: “Úrsula sighed. Melding history, memory, and prophecy, the novel follows the Buendía family through cyclical patterns of behavior and emotion. One salient literary example is Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Artists and authors explore this phenomenon as well. The continuum of crossing a Möbius strip is emblematic of how we experience time in a nonlinear way. We might ask ourselves after 2020, where are we? Have we spun around after so much chaos, and found our position stagnated, back where we started? Or are we at a new beginning? The figurative and narrative implications of the Möbius strip are rich: when you try to go forward, you ring sideways, when you try to circle in, you find yourself outside. After two loops, the ant would be back at the beginning-but dizzy. One apparent loop would land the ant not where it started but upside down, only halfway through a full circuit. Picture the insect traversing the Möbius band. A typical thought experiment to demonstrate how the three-dimensional strip operates involves imagining an ant on an adventure. A single-sided surface with no boundaries, the strip is an artist’s reverie and a mathematician’s feat. If you were to trace both “sides” of a Möbius strip, you would never have to lift your finger.
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