Because it represents the meaning of eternity, endless, ongoing, evolving, creating universe. Everything is linked together. ----------------------------------- A mobius strip is a strip of paper which is twisted and attached at the ends, forming an 'endless' two dimensional surface. At the heart of civilisation, or at least civilisation as defined by Western European culture, lies mathematics. And at the heart of mathematics lies the concept of infinity, denoted by the lemniscate symbol. Although both the lemniscate as symbol and as concept of infinity come to us from the start of human civilisation, its introduction into modern scientific usage only dates back to medieval times. The term lemniscate refers to the shape itself, and the Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli (1654-1705) first called the shape a lemniscus (Latin for ribbon) in an article in Acta Eruditorum in 1694. The origins of the lemniscate can be traced to various sources -The numeral 8 lying on its side, closed in on itself and physically representing infinity; the Etruscan sign CD, signifying 1000, which evolved into the Roman letter M; a lowercase omega, the last letter of the Greek alphabet; or a representation of the Möbius strip, a flat surface forever folding in on itself. The mathematical symbol for infinity is called the lemniscate. The infinity sign was devised in 1655 by mathemetician John Wallis, and named lemniscus (latin, ribbon) by mathemetician Bernoulli about forty years later. The lemniscate is patterned after the device known as a mobius (named after a nineteenth century mathemetician Mobius) strip. A mobius strip is a strip of paper which is twisted and attached at the ends, forming an 'endless' two dimensional surface. http://www.elderhs.net/staff/knepflecc/course3/index_2nd_quarter_until_xmas.htm Side Note - The religious aspect of the infinity symbol predates its mathematical origins. Similar symbols have been found in Tibetan rock carvings; and the ouroboros, or infinitysnake, is often depicted in this shape. In the tarot, it represents the balance of forces and is often associated with the magician card. These are the forces of duality, light/dark, yin/yang, good/evil all in constant flux and balance.

The precise origins of the infinity symbol [infty] are unclear. One possibility is suggested by the name it is sometimes called — the lemniscate, from the Latin lemniscus, meaning "ribbon". One can imagine walking forever along a simple loop formed from a ribbon. A popular explanation is that the infinity symbol is derived from the shape of a Möbius strip. Again, one can imagine walking along its surface forever. However, this explanation is improbable, since the symbol had been in use to represent infinity for over two hundred years before August Ferdinand Möbius and Johann Benedict Listing discovered the Möbius strip in 1858. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_symbol#Infinity_symbol John Wallis is usually credited with introducing infty as a symbol for infinity in 1655 in his De sectionibus conicus. One conjecture about why he chose this symbol is that he derived it from a Roman numeral for 1000 that was in turn derived from the Etruscan numeral for 1000, which looked somewhat like CIƆ and was sometimes used to mean "many". Another conjecture is that he derived it from the Greek letter ω (omega), the last letter in the Greek alphabet. The infinity symbol is represented in Unicode by the character ∞ (∞). The lemniscate was first described in 1694 by Jakob Bernoulli as a modification of an ellipse, which is the locus of points for which the sum of the distances to each of two fixed focal points is a constant. A lemniscate, by contrast, is the locus of points for which the product of these distances is constant. Bernoulli called it the lemniscus, which is Latin for 'pendant ribbon'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemniscate The Möbius strip or Möbius band is a surface with only one side and only one boundary component. It has the mathematical property of being non-orientable. It was co-discovered independently by the German mathematicians August Ferdinand Möbius and Johann Benedict Listing in 1858. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moebius_strip picture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:MobiusStrip-01.png Edit: An alternate way of writing lower case omega is omega with a line over it which looks similar to the infinity symbol. As Alatea noted "the Etruscan sign CD, signifying 1000"; 8 is 1000 in binary.