Comment on Y.-C. Chen, E. Fried, Möbius bands, unstretchable material sheets and developable surfaces. Proc. R. Soc. A 472, 20160459 (2016)

G.H.M. van der Heijden & E.L. Starostin

Chen & Fried claim that our solution of the shape of a material Möbius strip (taken to be inextensible) in Nature Materials 6 (2007) is incorrect as it involves stretching of the material. The purported proof of this claim, the calculation in §7, is in fact the main result of the paper. The claim is elaborated upon in subsequent publications with Fosdick. Here, we show that all these papers are based on a misunderstanding of the elastic deformation involved and what it means for such a deformation to be isometric (i.e. to preserve distances).

keywords: elastic strip, isometric deformation, developable surface

Proc. R. Soc. A 478, 20210629 (2022)