Bernard Morin (; 3 March 1931 in

Shanghai Shanghai, Shanghainese: , Standard Chinese pronunciation: is a direct-administered municipality and the most populous urban area in China. The city is located on the Chinese shoreline on the southern estuary of the Yangtze River, with the ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

– 12 March 2018) was a French

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

, specifically a topologist.

Early life and education

Morin lost his sight at the age of six due to

glaucoma Glaucoma is a group of eye diseases that can lead to damage of the optic nerve. The optic nerve transmits visual information from the eye to the brain. Glaucoma may cause vision loss if left untreated. It has been called the "silent thief of ...

, but his

blindness Visual or vision impairment (VI or VIP) is the partial or total inability of visual perception. In the absence of treatment such as corrective eyewear, assistive devices, and medical treatment, visual impairment may cause the individual difficul ...

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 The French National Centre for Scientific Research (, , CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,637 staff, including 11,137 tenured researchers, 13,415 eng ...

Career

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

homotopy In topology, two continuous functions from one topological space to another are called homotopic (from and ) if one can be "continuously deformed" into the other, such a deformation being called a homotopy ( ; ) between the two functions. ...

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 In geometry, Boy's surface is an immersion of the real projective plane in three-dimensional space. It was discovered in 1901 by the German mathematician Werner Boy, who had been tasked by his doctoral thesis advisor David Hilbert to prove th ...

(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 The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry located in Princeton, New Jersey. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholars, including Albert Ein ...

Princeton, New Jersey The Municipality of Princeton is a Borough (New Jersey), borough in Mercer County, New Jersey, United States. It was established on January 1, 2013, through the consolidation of the Borough of Princeton, New Jersey, Borough of Princeton and Pri ...

. Most of his career, though, he spent at the

University of Strasbourg The University of Strasbourg (, Unistra) is a public research university located in Strasbourg, France, with over 52,000 students and 3,300 researchers. Founded in the 16th century by Johannes Sturm, it was a center of intellectual life during ...

.
::::''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 Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

file at the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

's website. {{DEFAULTSORT:Morin, Bernard 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

Early life and education

Career

See also

References

External links