Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2022 / ib / Paper 3 / 12F (Geometry)

A topological surface is a Hausdorff, second-countable space in which every point has a neighbourhood homeomorphic to an open subset of ${\mathbb{R}}^2$.

For $S_1$, interior points and points in the interiors of paired edges plainly have disc neighbourhoods. The corner identifications form two classes; in each class two quarter-discs are glued to make a half-disc, and the adjacent identified edge neighbourhoods complete a disc. Equivalently, this polygon is a cell decomposition of the real projective plane, hence a quotient of $S^2$ by the antipodal group. Thus $S_1$ is a topological surface.

In $S_2$, three distinct sides labelled $a$ are identified. A point in the interior of their common image has a neighbourhood made from three half-discs meeting along their diameters. Removing the common diameter leaves three local sides rather than two, so this neighbourhood is not a disc or half-disc. Therefore

Cut the octagon for $S_3$ along a diagonal joining the appropriate two vertex classes. The two resulting polygons can be reattached along that diagonal in the opposite order. Reading the new boundary word gives the square wordwhich is exactly the edge identification displayed for $S_4$. The cut-and-paste map is affine on the two pieces and respects every paired edge, so it descends to a homeomorphism $S_3\cong S_4$. Both are the Klein bottle.

After deleting an open disc, the punctured Klein bottle can be realized as a boundary connected sum of two embedded Möbius strips, and hence embeds in ${\mathbb{R}}^3$. The closed Klein bottle cannot embed: every connected closed surface embedded in ${\mathbb{R}}^3$ is two-sided and therefore orientable, by the Jordan-Brouwer separation theorem, whereas the Klein bottle is nonorientable. Thus