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Bernard Morin (French: [mɔʁɛ̃]; 3 March 1931 in Shanghai, China – 12 March 2018) 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. He received his Ph.D. in 1972 from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

Career

Morin was a member of the group that first exhibited an eversion of the sphere, 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.

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

Morin's surface.

See also

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

References

1. "Décès de Bernard Morin". Société Mathématique de France (in French). Archived from the original on 2018-10-12. Retrieved 2018-10-11.
2. ^ Apéry, François. "BERNARD MORIN (1931-2018)" (PDF). Société Mathématique de France (in French). Archived from the original (PDF) on 12 October 2018.
3. "Bernard Morin". Institute for Advanced Study. Retrieved 20 July 2017.
4. Morin, Bernard (13 November 1978). "Équations du retournement de la sphère" [Equations of the sphere eversion]. C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris (in French): 879–882. Retrieved 26 February 2021.
5. Weisstein, Eric W. "Boy Surface". Wolfram MathWorld. Archived from the original on 2004-04-13.

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

External links

• Photos of Morin Archived 2019-04-20 at the Wayback Machine with stereolithography models of sphere eversion.
• The World of Blind Mathematicians, PDF file at the American Mathematical Society's website.

• 1931 births
• 2018 deaths
• French mathematicians
• French blind people
• Blind scholars and academics
• Institute for Advanced Study visiting scholars
• Topologists
• Academic staff of the University of Strasbourg
• Scientists from Shanghai
• Educators from Shanghai
• French scientists with disabilities