# Who first discovered that the torus supports a flat structure?

Who first recognized that there exists a homogenous metric on the closed genus 1 orientable surface?

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IDK. May be whoever had a sheet of paper, and noticed that you can roll it to form a tube without stretching. And then observed that if the material does stretch a bit, you could bend it to form a torus? Or may be a map-maker during a coffee break, who noticed that longitudes and latitudes would work very well on the surface of a donut. I really think that this metric on the torus is so natural that nobody would want his/her name associated with its discovery - and/or it was independently arrived at by very many people. –  Jyrki Lahtonen Nov 10 '12 at 7:21

I believe from this paper that Clifford was the one of the first people to describe a flat metric on the torus; he was the first to explicitly embed the torus into $\mathbb{R}^4$ in the standard flat way; this paper also states that he was one of the first to speak of the torus as a parallelogram with opposite edges identified. It's a fun paper to read!