Houston Chronicle // Sergio Chapa // 11.29.19: The mobius strip, a geometrical object with no beginning and end, is gaining popularity in public art and among corporations, which view it as a way to symbolize transformation, evolution and innovation.
The mobius, recently adopted as the new logo of the Houston oilfield services company Baker Hughes and before that the tech company BMC Software, was independently theorized and illustrated in the mid-1800s by German mathematicians Johann Benedict Listing and August Ferdinand Möbius. The mobius is a strip or line that can be looped in a way where the shape is creates has no beginning or end and no discernible direction up or down.
The most well-known example of the mobius strip is the infinity symbol, which looks like a figure eight laying on its side. The Dutch artist M.C. Escher also created a popular series of drawings in the 1950s and 1960s that depicted staircases that appeared to be going around in infinite loops.