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The surface itself is the Klein bottle, so I would expect its boundary to be some 1-dimensional object, in the same way the boundary of a disk is the circle surrounding it.



A Mobius strip is a twisted non-orientable 2D surface that exists in 3 dimensions, with a 1D edge.

A Klein bottle is a twisted non-orientable 3D volume that exists in 4 dimensions, with a 2D "edge" surface.


You get a Klein bottle from Möbius strip by identifying the boundary 1-cell with itself (plus a twist, whatever). It is not a "3d volume"; there is no 3-cell involved.


From wiki: "Whereas a Möbius strip is a surface with boundary, a Klein bottle has no boundary (for comparison, a sphere is an orientable surface with no boundary)." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein_bottle)


Then, could you explain what Pxtl meant by “a Klein bottle is a 4d moebius strip”?


Sure.

One standard way to construct both a Möbius strip and a Klein bottle (and other classic manifolds) is to take a square, and glue some edges together.

For a Möbius strip, you glue together the left and right (say) edges, such that the upper part of one connects to the bottom part of the other (that is, put a twist in the square before you glue).

For a Klein bottle, you additionally glue together the top and bottom edges, but don't twist them. This is what it means to say a Klein bottle is "like a Möbius strip" or "two strips glued together" or similar things.

The "4d" comes in because if you want to do this with a physical object, you need four spatial dimensions unless you're ok with it passing thru itself.

Here's a good picture : http://web.ornl.gov/sci/ortep/topology/topo5.gif The arrows indicate which edges to glue together, and how to line them up.

See also bmm6o's comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11196493


Thanks!




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