Lego Klein Bottle


After seeing some of my other mathematical Lego sculptures, a couple of people asked about a Klein bottle, so...

This one hinges open so that you can see its digestive tract. I changed brick colour at the top and bottom to show up the intersection where the tubes cross better. Not because I didn't have enough bricks left in any one colour. Really, honest. Well, OK -  it was because I didn't have enough bricks left in any one colour. Apart from the hinges, the bottle is constructed out of standard 1xN and 2xN bricks.

A mathematician named Klein
Thought the Mobius strip was divine
He said "If you glue
The edges of two
You can make a strange bottle like mine".

The truth of the limerick can be seen in the main photograph - each half of the bottle is topologically a Mobius strip (and yes, the gap does run all the way round the inner tube at the bottom).

Building this took forever - partly because I was generously recording every brick in MLCad so that  I could give you this LDRAW .DAT file for (just one half of) the bottle . If anyone else out there  has sufficiently little of a life that they build one of these, please let me know!
 

The pictures on this page are Copyright © A. Lipson 2000

Lego ® is a trademark of The Lego Group, who have nothing to do with this or any of my other Lego-related web pages.

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This page last modified 2nd April 2005