I’ve been reading up on this month’s announcement that the 3-body problem has 13 more solutions, and came across a wonderful little nugget of a wikipedia disambiguation:
Pair of pants
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It’s usually the case that disambiguations favor primary topics by usage but, in same strange twist of fate, the following image is described with the awesomely gross sentence:
Six pairs of pants sewn together to form an open surface of genus two with four boundary components.
So think about that next time you’re at the sewing machine, trying to patch your punctured spheres.
[Edit: “Trousers” is now the front page of the “Pair of pants” redirect, accessed April 2013]
Links
[1] sciencemag.org article: physicists-discover-a-whopping.html
[2] wiki/Pair_of_pants
[3] wiki/Wikipedia:Disambiguation#Is_there_a_primary_topic.3F
[4] wiki/File:Worldsheet.png
[5] wiki/Riemann_surface#Punctured_spheres
that's gross 