
In response to guest author George Hart’s “Mathematically-correct breakfast” piece in last week’s inaugural “Math Monday” column, the folks at Serious Eats New York wanted to know “Why should the bagel get all the geometric jollies?” So they made themselves a “Möbius doughnut.” Sweet.
(The finished product is actually NOT a Möbius strip, but two interlocking rings, just like the bagel, with each half achieved via a Möbius cut.)
6 thoughts on “Chain-link bagel? Meet Möbius doughnut”
Comments are closed.
Um, I’m not totally sure what you mean by Mobius cut. That would seem to imply that there is a non-orientable surface here – which there isn’t since there is a full twist in the band, not a half twist. The mathematician you want to name this one after is Hopf. For the doughnut and the bagel, the boundary of the cut and the resultant bready links are Hopf links.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopf_link
To clarify: A Möbius strip is just a surface; it has no thickness. You can make a paper model of it by taking a strip of paper and giving it a twist before joining the ends, so the front and back become the same side, and so there is only one side. If you give the paper strip two such twists before joining the ends, you have a “two-twist mobius strip” which still has two sides. The donut shown here (and the linked bagel on which it is based) is cut along a surface which is a two-twist mobius strip. But I wouldn’t use the term “Möbius donut.”
There is the the theory of the mobius, a twist in the fabric of dough, where eating becomes a loop, from which there is no escape.