# A clock is a one-dimensional subgroup of the torus

Recently, my partner and I installed a clock in our home. The clock previously belonged to my grandparents and we have owned it for a while. We hadn’t put it up earlier because the original clock movement ticked and the sound would disrupt our small studio apartment. After much procrastinating, I bought a new clock movement, replaced the old one and proudly hung up our clock.

When I first put on the clock hands I made the mistake of not putting them both on at exactly 12 o’clock. This meant that the minute and hour hands were not synchronised. The hands were in an impossible position. At times, the minute hand was at 12 and the hour hand was between 3 and 4. It took some time for me to register my mistake as at some times of the day it can be hard to tell that the hands are out of sync (how often do you look at a clock at 12:00 exactly?). Fortunately, I did notice the mistake and we have a correct clock. Now I can’t help noticing when others make the same mistake such as in this piece of clip art.

After fixing the clock, I was still thinking about how only some clock hand positions correspond to actual times. This led me to think “a clock is a one-dimensional subgroup of the torus”. Let me explain why.

### The torus

The minute and hour hands on a clock can be thought of as two points on two different circles. For instance, if the time is 9:30, then the minute hand corresponds to a point at the very bottom of the circle and the hour hand corresponds to a point 15 degrees clockwise of the leftmost point of the circle. As a clock goes through a 12 hour cycle the minute-hand-point goes around the circle 12 times and the hour-hand-point goes around the circle once. This is shown below.

If you take the collection of all pairs of points on a circle you get what mathematicians call a torus. The torus is a geometric shape that looks like the surface of a donut. The torus is defined as the Cartesian product of two circles. That is, a single point on the torus corresponds to two points on two different circles. A torus is plotted below.

To understand the torus, it’s helpful to consider a more familiar example, the 2-dimensional plane. If we have points $x$ and $y$ on two different lines, then we can produce the point $(x,y)$ in the two dimensional plane. Likewise, if we have a point $p$ and a point $q$ on two different circles, then we can produce a point $(p,q)$ on the torus. Both of these concepts are illustrated below. I have added two circles to the torus which are analogous to the x and y axes of the plane. The blue and red points on the blue and red circle produce the black point on the torus.

### Mapping the clock to the torus

The points on the torus are in one-to-one correspondence with possible arrangements of the two clock hands. However, as I learnt putting up our clock, not all arrangements of clock hands correspond to an actual time. This means that only some points on the torus correspond to an actual time but how can we identify these points?

Keeping with our previous convention, let’s use the blue circle to represent the position of the minute hand and the red circle to represent the position of the hour hand. This means that the point where the two circles meet corresponds to 12 o’clock.

There are eleven other points on the red line that correspond to the other times when the minute hand is at 12. That is, there’s a point for 1 o’clock, 2 o’clock, 3 o’clock and so on. Once we add in those points, our torus looks like this:

Finally, we have to join these points together. We know that when the hour hand moves from 12 to 1, the minute hand does one full rotation. This means that we have to join the black points by making one full rotation in the direction of the blue circle. The result is the black curve below that snakes around the torus.

The picture above should explain most of this blog’s title – “a clock is a one-dimensional subgroup of the torus”. We now know what the torus is and why certain points on the torus correspond to positions of the hands on a clock. We can see that these “clock points” correspond to a line that snakes around the torus. While the torus is a surface and hence two dimensional, the line is one-dimensional. The last missing part is the word “subgroup”. I won’t go into the details here but the torus has some extra structure that makes it something called a group. Our map from the clock to the torus interacts nicely with this structure and this makes the black line a “subgroup”.

### Another perspective

While the above pictures of the torus are pretty, they can be a bit hard to understand and hard to draw. Mathematicians have another perspective of the torus that is often easier to work with. Imagine that you have a square sheet of rubber. If you rolled up the rubber and joined a pair of opposite sides, you would get a rubber tube. If you then bent the tube to join the opposite sides again, you would get a torus! The gif bellow illustrates this idea

This means that we can simply view the torus as a square. We just have to remember that the opposite sides of the squares have been glued together. So like a game of snake on a phone, if you leave the top of the square, you come out at the same place on the bottom of the square. If we use this idea to redraw our torus it now looks like this:

As before we can draw in the other points when the minute hand is at 12. These points correspond to 1 o’clock, 2 o’clock, 3 o’clock…

Finally we can draw in all the other times on the clock. This is the result:

One nice thing about this picture is that it can help us answer a classic riddle. In a 12-hour cycle, how many times are the minute and hour hands on top of each other? We can answer this riddle by adding a second line to the above square. The bottom-left to top-right diagonal is the collection of all hand positions where the two hands are on top of each other. Let’s add that line in green and add the points where this new line intersects the black line.

The points where the green and black lines intersect are hand positions where the clock hands are directly on top of each other and which correspond to actual times. Thus we can count that there are exactly 11 times when the hands are on top of each other in a 12-hour cycle. It might look like there are 12 such times but we have to remember that the corners of the square are all the same point on the torus.

So far I have ignored the second hand on the clock. If we included the second hand, we would have three points on three different circles. The corresponding geometric object is a 3-dimensional torus. The 3-dimensional torus is what you get when you take a cube and glue together the three pairs of opposite faces (don’t worry if you have trouble visualising such a shape!).

The points on the 3-dimensional torus which correspond to actual times will again be a line that wraps around the 3-dimensional torus. You could use this line to find out how many times the three hands are all on top of each other! Let me know if you work it out.

I hope that if you’re ever asked to define a clock, you’d at least consider saying “a clock is a one-dimensional subgroup of the torus” and you could even tell them which subgroup!

## 2 thoughts on “A clock is a one-dimensional subgroup of the torus”

1. graham says:

awesome! pls make a toroidal clock! i think it would look awesome on a coffee table

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