What are Borromean rings?

Borromean rings are three rings that are connected so that the removal of one ring causes the entire structure to disintegrate. This is an illustration of what is called Brunnian Link, a situation where no two loops in the picture are directly connected. In addition to being represented by circles, Borromean rings can also be made with a number of other shapes or a combination of several shapes together. Surprisingly, when borromeans are designed in three dimensions, they cannot actually be made with three flat circles. For example, they appear in Buddhist art a thousand years ago and can be seen on the Viking Rune Stones, in Roman mosaics and the assortment of other places. It seems that people have a permanent fascination with the phenomenon of borromeans and appear especially in religious works of art from different cultures. In Christian art, for Exampple, Borromean's rings, they are often used to represent the Holy Trinity. The rings are named for the Borromeo Family Italian nobles whoIt is perfectly used in their family coat of arms, popularizing three interconnected rings.

using three -dimensional modeling, mathematicians have shown that Borromean's rings cannot be made in real life, because the rings would have to be distorted to form the desired Brunnian Link. However, they can be made of ellipses, triangles, squares and other shapes. You may have seen Borromean's rings in the form of toys that require people to remove one link, causing the toy to disintegrate. Stores that specialize in logical puzzles and brain teasers oftenock Borromean Rings.

Borromean rings are just the simplest form of Brunnian Link. Brunian links can be created with a potentially infinite number of shapes and can be very complex and in fact quite nice. Members of the scientific community studied Brunnian references to see how they relate to things such as the structureTura molecules, and some early attempts to model DNA shape were made with Brunnian Links.