This month we’ll continue with April’s experiments with the Mobius strip. Mathematicians are often secretly Platonists: we distinguish between a universal object and how we’ve chosen to describe or present it. We looked at a little of this last time. Below is another example. Is the wiggly line on the left still a circle? We just took the one on the right and moved it around. Did it change? In what ways? In what ways is it the same?
We’ll spend some time thinking about this and applying it to some simple objects that are very similar to (and include) the twisted bands we played with last month.
The May meeting of the Fayetteville Math Circle will be Saturday, May 2nd at the Fayettville Public Library.
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