Friday, December 31, 2010

Topology Coffee Mug

Topology Mug found on IQ Therefore I Am


How the humor works:

"Intuitively two spaces are homeomorphic if one can be deformed into the other
without cutting or gluing. A traditional joke is that a topologist can't distinguish a coffee mug from a doughnut, since a sufficiently pliable doughnut could be reshaped
to the form of a coffee cup by creating a dimple and progressively enlarging it, while shrinking the hole into a handle. A precise definition of homeomorphic, involving a continuous function with a continuous inverse, is necessarily more technical."
—Wikipedia, Topology

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