Listen With Others

August Ferdinand Möbius was a German mathematician, immortalised by his one-sided surfaces formed (in the simplest case) by taking a strip of paper, twisting it once and then fastening the ends together.  This one-sided shape then has more interesting properties than you might first imagine.  Has everyone tried cutting one down the middle lengthwise, as a simple example?  Or cutting down its length but in a width ratio 1:2?  Or inserting multiple twists before fastening?  All good fun I can remember trying over half a lifetime ago …

In this week’s puzzle it seems to be being used to instruct the words starting horizontally on the right to finish horizontally on the left, in the 180deg rotationally symmetric locations.  Going with this approach appeared to be right, and it let the eleven-letter phrase MOBIUS STRIP appear diagonally down, starting at 2.

To visualise it some more, I envisaged it being solved on a piece of acetate and then formed into a strip after one twist.  This allowed the words to be seen joined up with the letters in the correct order but with some inverted.  I experimented with inverting some letters in the original grid but I couldn’t find a combination of inversions that worked both Horizontally and Vertically, so decided I must be overcomplicating it and stopped there.  I am going to feel a twit when I find out I’ve missed something!

Cheers

Tim / Encota