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Our image of the week shows a Klein bottle!

Image © Charles Trevelyan.

The Klein bottle is a very strange shape, discovered in 1882 by the mathematician Felix Klein. It intersects itself, only has one side (as opposed to an inside and an outside) and you can turn a pattern drawn on the bottle into its mirror image simply by sliding it along. You can find out more here. This picture of the Klein bottle was created by Charles Trevelyan and rendered partially transparent so that we can see the inside.

The picture is one of the images that appear in the book 50 visions of mathematics, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications.

You can see previous images of the week here.

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