Does Form Really Shape Function?

The Joy of Why

Steven Strogatz, Janna Levin and Quanta Magazine

Science, Life Sciences

4.9 • 577 Ratings

🗓️ 12 June 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What links a Möbius strip, brain folds and termite mounds? The answer is Harvard University’s L. Mahadevan, whose career has been devoted to using mathematics and physics to explore the form and function of common phenomena.

Mahadevan, or Maha to his friends and colleagues, has long been fascinated by questions one wouldn’t normally ask — from the equilibrium shape of inert objects like a Möbius strip, to the complex factors that drive biological systems like morphogenesis or social insect colonies.

In this episode of The Joy of Why, Mahadevan tells co-host Steven Strogatz what inspires him to tackle these questions, and how gels, gypsum and LED lights can help uncover form and function in biological systems. He also offers some provocative thoughts about how noisy random processes might underlie our intuitions about geometry.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Steve Strogatz.
0:06.4	And I'm Janelle Levin.
0:08.3	And this is The Joy of Why, a podcast from Quantum Magazine exploring some of the biggest
0:13.4	unanswered questions in math and science today.
0:18.5	Hi, Jana.
0:19.5	Hey, how you doing?
0:22.1	Good. Great to see you.
0:23.3	Great to see you.
0:25.3	Interested to hear what you have for me today.
0:29.3	Good. I'm going to start by talking about Mobius strips.
0:30.7	Oh, you know, my favorite.
0:31.5	They are?
0:33.6	Oh, I have a whole thing about Mobia strips.
0:35.1	What is that all about?
0:54.4	Oh, you know, just connectedness of spacetime. They're quite intriguing, but I don't want to interrupt you. You're not. I was going to ask you, maybe for anyone who needs reminding, what do you mean by Amobia strip? Well, Amobia strip to me is literally a strip, as though it was a piece of paper, where you could glue two ends and make a cylinder,
0:58.0	but a Mobia strip, you twist it first and then glue it together.
1:00.1	I would say you put a half twist.
1:06.9	If I turn it 180 degrees and then glue it, then there's all kinds of funny implications.
1:28.0	Right. That might not sound like a huge modification, but it's actually really peculiar. It means if you go around one time, you're now inside the strip. So it seems to suggest like there's no clear side of it. To me, the big moral is that notions like side and edge and surface are not as simple or intuitive as we thought they were.
1:29.6	All kinds of strange things can happen.
1:33.3	You can take a left-handed glove on a trip and it comes back right-handed.
1:37.1	It can really mess you up.
	...

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