Bernard Morin

Looping animated cutaway view of Boy's surface.

Bernard Morin is a French mathematician, specifically a topologist, born in 1931, who is now retired. He has been blind since age 6 due to glaucoma, but his blindness did not prevent him from having a successful career in mathematics.

Morin was a member of the group that first exhibited an eversion of the sphere, i.e. a homotopy (topological metamorphosis) which starts with a sphere and ends with the same sphere but turned inside-out. (See Smale's paradox.) 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.

He discovered the first parametrization of Boy's surface (earlier used as a half-way model) in 1978. His graduate student François Apéry later discovered (in 1986) another parametrization of Boy's surface, which conforms to the general method for parametrizing non-orientable surfaces.^[1]

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

Morin's surface.

References

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

External links

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