We show that the Loss-Yau zero modes of the 3d abelian Dirac operator may be interpreted in a simple manner in terms of a stereographic projection from a 4d Dirac operator with a constant field strength of definite helicity. This is an alternative to
the conventional viewpoint involving Hopf maps from S^3 to S^2. Furthermore, our construction generalizes in a straightforward way to any odd dimension. The number of zero modes is related to the Chern-Simons number in a nonlinear manner.
