Science Alert
By Felicity Nelson
September 13, 2023
For nearly fifty years, mathematicians have puzzled over a deceptively simple question: how small can you make a Möbius strip without it intersecting itself?
Now, Richard Schwartz, a mathematician at Brown University, has proposed an elegant solution to this problem, which was originally posed by mathematicians Charles Weaver and Benjamin Halpern in 1977.
In their paper, Halpern and Weaver pose a limit for Möbius strips based on the familiar geometry of folded bits of solid paper – that the ratio between the length and width of the paper must be greater than √3, or around 1.73.