Tait's 1883 obituary of Johann Listing: In Vorstudien zur Topologie, 1847 Listing introduces the theories of ... paradromic winding. A special example of these ... is the well-known juggler's trick of slitting a ring-formed band up the middle, through its whole length, so that instead of separating into two parts, it remains in a continuous ring. For this purpose it is only necessary to give a strip of paper one half-twist before pasting the ends together. If three half-twists be given, the paper still remains a continuous band after slitting, but it cannot be opened into a ring, it is in fact a trefoil knot.

Lineage: Gauss ⇒ Listing⇒ Maxwell/Kelvin/Tait/Riemann ⇒ Poincaré ⇒ Einstein ⇒ Conway ⇒ theories of the structure of the universe!