Shakespeare,the Mobius strip and the Klein Bottle

For Wednesday, this week, Toot and I have tickets to see a performance of William Shakespeare's play 'The Tempest'. The play is being staged in the cloisters at Norwich Cathedral.  Good weather is therefore an essential and for the last few days we have experienced torrential rain.

We have not seen this play staged, other than on television, so we are very much looking forward to this performance.

We have both seen the Sci-fi film classic 'The Forbidden Planet' and the stage musical 'Return to the Forbidden Planet', which are based upon the Tempest.

We saw 'Return to the Forbidden Planet' with our friends, Phil and Jean, at the Lyceum in Sheffield.  The protagonist in the Tempest is 'Prospero' the rightful Duke of Milan, who finds himself exiled and marooned on a remote island with his daughter Miranda. In the  the Sci-Fi version, the island becomes a remote planet and Prospero and Miranda become Dr Morbius and Altaira.

Norwich Cathedral Cloister

Now, our friend Phil is studying for an Open University degree in Mathematics and the last time I saw him we got to talking about the 'Mobius Strip'.  Morbius short of an 'r'.

'The Swan of Avon'
"Nice Bard but dangerous"

Along with the 'Klein bottle', the 'Mobius Strip' is a non-orientable surface. The 'Strip' is a surface with a boundary and the 'Bottle' has no boundary. You cannot make a 'Klein Bottle' but you can make a 'Mobius Strip'. Just take a rectangular strip of paper,twist once and paste the ends together.  Draw a line along the centre of the strip and you will come back to where you started.  Cut along this line and be surprised at the result.

For more on Mobius Strips and Klein Bottles see the following web-sites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_strip
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=sRTKSzAOBr4

Thanks to Wikipedia and Norwich Cathedral for the images