Old old journal entry

[bram]

From Thom Whitmore's class in Glen Rock, NJ. I was actually required to keep journal, and funnily enough, it reads a lot like my adult journal.

Comments

[cancionista.livejournal.com]

If you wish these older posts to remain pristine and commentless, I won't be offended if you delete this. My question is about the Klein bottle doodle - Is this Klein the Klein of 'Kaluza-Klein', and if so, what is a Klein bottle? (If not, I have no frame of referrence, but am still curious.)

[bram.livejournal.com]

You could look it up--MathWorld, Wikipedia, etc. I think there was a very important 19th century mathematician named Klein--I think he worked along with Hilbert. I think Kaluza-Klein was a 20th century post-Einstein development (Einstein refereed Kaluza's paper, which must have been around 1920, and Klein's quantum mechanical treatment must have been later.)

So my guess is that Klein bottle would have been named after an earlier Klein than the Kaluza-Klein Klein.

Ah! interesting.

[cancionista.livejournal.com]

In mathematics, the Klein bottle is a certain non-orientable surface, i.e., a surface (a two-dimensional topological space) with no distinction between the "inside" and "outside" surfaces. The Klein bottle was first described in 1882 by the German mathematician Felix Klein. Other related non-orientable objects are the Möbius strip and the real projective plane. It was originally named the "Klein-Fläche" 'Klein surface'; however, this was incorrectly interpreted as "Klein-Flasche" 'Klein bottle', which ultimately, due to the dominance of the English language in science, led to the adoption of this term in the German language as well.