Bernard Morin

File:AnimatedBoySurface.gif

Looping animated cutaway view of Boy's surface.

Bernard Morin ({{#invoke:IPA|main}}; 3 March 1931 in Shanghai, China – 12 March 2018)<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> was a French mathematician, specifically a topologist.

Early life and education

Morin lost his sight at the age of six due to glaucoma, but his blindness did not prevent him from having a successful career in mathematics.<ref name="Apery">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He received his Ph.D. in 1972 from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name="Apery" />

Career

Morin was a member of the group that first exhibited an eversion of the sphere,<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> i.e., a homotopy which starts with a sphere and ends with the same sphere but turned inside-out. He also discovered the Morin surface, which is a half-way model for the sphere eversion, and used it to prove a lower bound on the number of steps needed to turn a sphere inside out.

Morin discovered the first parametrization of Boy's surface (earlier used as a half-way model), in 1978. His graduate student François Apéry, in 1986, discovered another parametrization of Boy's surface, which conforms to the general method for parametrizing non-orientable surfaces.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Morin worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Most of his career, though, he spent at the University of Strasbourg.

File:MorinSurfaceCrossView.PNG

Morin's surface.

See also

• Blind mathematicians: Leonhard Euler, Nicholas Saunderson, Lev Pontryagin, Louis Antoine

References

Template:Reflist George K. Francis & Bernard Morin (1980) "Arnold Shapiro's Eversion of the Sphere", Mathematical Intelligencer 2(4):200–3.

External links

• Photos of Morin Template:Webarchive with stereolithography models of sphere eversion.
• The World of Blind Mathematicians, PDF file at the American Mathematical Society's website.