Borromean rings


In mathematics, the Borromean rings consist of three topological circles which are linked but where removing any one ring leaves the other two unconnected. In other words, no two of the three rings are linked with each other as a Hopf link, but nonetheless all three are linked. The Borromean rings are one of a class of such links called Brunnian links.

Mathematical properties

Ring shape

The Borromean rings are typically drawn with their rings projecting to circles in the plane of the drawing, but three-dimensional circular Borromean rings are an impossible object: it is not possible to form the Borromean rings from circles in three-dimensional space. proved that a certain class of links, including the Borromean links, cannot be exactly circular. For three rings in their conventional Borromean arrangement, this can be seen from considering the link diagram. If one assumes that two of the circles touch at their two crossing points, then they lie in either a plane or a sphere. In either case, the third circle must pass through this plane or sphere four times, without lying in it, which is impossible.
However, the Borromean rings can be realized using ellipses. These may be taken to be of arbitrarily small eccentricity; i.e. no matter how close to being circular their shape may be, as long as they are not perfectly circular, they can form Borromean links if suitably positioned.
s in a regular icosahedron
A realization of the Borromean rings by three mutually perpendicular golden rectangles can be found within a regular icosahedron by connecting three opposite pairs of its edges.
Every three unknotted polygons in Euclidean space may be combined, after a suitable scaling transformation, to form the Borromean rings. If all three polygons are planar, then scaling is not needed. More generally, Matthew Cook has conjectured that any three unknotted simple closed curves in space, not all circles, can be combined without scaling to form the Borromean rings. After Jason Cantarella suggested a possible counterexample, Hugh Nelson Howards weakened the conjecture to apply to any three planar curves that are not all circles. On the other hand, although there are infinitely many Brunnian links with three links, the Borromean rings are the only one that can be formed from three convex curves.

Linkedness

In knot theory, the Borromean rings are a simple example of a Brunnian link: although each pair of rings is unlinked, the whole link cannot be unlinked. There are a number of ways of seeing that the Borromean rings are linked; one is to count their Fox -colorings. A trivial link would have 125 Fox 5-colorings, but the Borromean rings have only five.

Number theory

In arithmetic topology, there is an analogy between knots and prime numbers in which one considers links between primes. The triple of primes are linked modulo 2 but are pairwise unlinked modulo 2. Therefore, these primes have been called a "proper Borromean triple modulo 2" or "mod 2 Borromean primes".

Hyperbolic geometry

The Borromean rings are a hyperbolic link: the complement of the Borromean rings in the 3-sphere admits a complete hyperbolic metric of finite volume. The canonical polyhedral decomposition of the complement consists of two ideal regular octahedra. The volume is where is the Lobachevsky function. This was a central example in the video Not Knot about knot complements, produced in 1991 by the Geometry Center.

Name and history

The name "Borromean rings" comes from their use in the coat of arms of the aristocratic Borromeo family in Northern Italy. The link itself is much older and has appeared in the form of the valknut, three linked equilateral triangles with parallel sides, on Norse image stones dating back to the 7th century. A stone pillar in the 6th-century Marundeeswarar Temple in India shows the Borromean rings in another form, three linked equilateral triangles rotated from each other to form a regular enneagram. The Ōmiwa Shrine in Japan is also decorated with a motif of the Borromean rings, in their conventional circular form.
, from a 13th-century manuscript.
The Borromean rings have been used in different contexts to indicate strength in unity. In particular, some have used the design to symbolize the Trinity. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan found inspiration in the Borromean rings as a model for his topology of human subjectivity, with each ring representing a fundamental Lacanian component of reality.
The rings were used as the logo of Ballantine beer, and are still used by the Ballantine brand beer, now distributed by the current brand owner, the Pabst Brewing Company. For this reason they have sometimes been called the "Ballantine rings".
Seifert surfaces for the Borromean rings were featured by Martin Gardner in his September 1961 "Mathematical Games column" in Scientific American. In 2006, the International Mathematical Union decided at the 25th International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid, Spain to use a new logo based on the Borromean rings.

Partial and multiple rings

In medieval and renaissance Europe, a number of visual signs are found that consist of three elements interlaced together in the same way that the Borromean rings are shown interlaced, but the individual elements are not closed loops. Examples of such symbols are the Snoldelev stone horns and the Diana of Poitiers crescents.
Similarly, a monkey's fist knot is essentially a 3-dimensional representation of the Borromean rings, albeit with three layers, in most cases. Using the pattern in the incomplete Borromean rings, one can balance three knives on three supports, such as three bottles or glasses, providing a support in the middle for a fourth bottle or glass.
Some knot-theoretic links contain multiple Borromean rings configurations; one five-loop link of this type is used as a symbol in Discordianism, based on a depiction in the Principia Discordia.

Physical realizations

are the molecular counterparts of Borromean rings, which are mechanically-interlocked molecular architectures. In 1997, biologist Chengde Mao and coworkers of New York University succeeded in constructing a set of rings from DNA. In 2003, chemist Fraser Stoddart and coworkers at UCLA utilised coordination chemistry to construct a set of rings in one step from 18 components. Borromean ring structures have been shown to be an effective way to represent the structure of certain atomically precise noble metal clusters which are shielded by a surface layer of thiolate ligands, such as Au2518 and Ag2518. A library of Borromean networks has been synthesized by design by Giuseppe Resnati and coworkers via halogen bond driven self-assembly. In order to access the molecular Borromean ring consisting of three unequal cycles a step-by-step synthesis was proposed by Jay S. Siegel and coworkers.
A quantum-mechanical analog of Borromean rings is called a halo state or an Efimov state. For the first time the research group of Rudolf Grimm and Hanns-Christoph Nägerl from the Institute for Experimental Physics experimentally confirmed such a state in an ultracold gas of caesium atoms in 2006, and published their findings in the scientific journal Nature. A team of physicists led by Randall Hulet of Rice University in Houston achieved this with a set of three bound lithium atoms and published their findings in the online journal Science Express. In 2010, a team led by K. Tanaka created an Efimov state within a nucleus.