Werner Boy (; 4 May 1879 − 6 September 1914) was a German

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, structure, space, models, and change. History O ...

. He was the discoverer and eponym of Boy's surface—a

three-dimensional Three-dimensional space (also: 3D space, 3-space or, rarely, tri-dimensional space) is a geometric setting in which three values (called ''parameters'') are required to determine the position of an element (i.e., point). This is the informal ...

projection of the

real projective plane In mathematics, the real projective plane is an example of a compact non- orientable two-dimensional manifold; in other words, a one-sided surface. It cannot be embedded in standard three-dimensional space without intersecting itself. It has b ...

without singularities, the first of its kind. He discovered it in 1901 after his thesis adviser,

David Hilbert David Hilbert (; ; 23 January 1862 – 14 February 1943) was a German mathematician, one of the most influential mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Hilbert discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental ideas in many a ...

, asked him to prove that it was not possible to immerse the real projective plane in three-dimensional space. Boy sketched several models of the surface, and discovered that it could have 3-fold rotational symmetry, but was unable to find a

parametric model In statistics, a parametric model or parametric family or finite-dimensional model is a particular class of statistical models. Specifically, a parametric model is a family of probability distributions that has a finite number of parameters. Defi ...

for the surface. It was not until 1978 that

Bernard Morin Bernard Morin (; 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 f ...

found the first parametrisation, with the aid of computers. After completing his dissertation, Boy worked as a high school teacher in

Krefeld, Germany Krefeld ( , ; li, Krieëvel ), also spelled Crefeld until 1925 (though the spelling was still being used in British papers throughout the Second World War), is a city in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is located northwest of Düsseldorf, i ...

. He later returned to his birth town of Barmen (today

Wuppertal Wuppertal (; "''Wupper Dale''") is, with a population of approximately 355,000, the seventh-largest city in North Rhine-Westphalia as well as the 17th-largest city of Germany. It was founded in 1929 by the merger of the cities and to ...

) to teach. He died as a soldier in the first weeks of World War I on 6 September 1914.

External links

*
Boy's original paper (in German)

Papers and a movie about Boy's immersion
1879 births 1914 deaths 20th-century German mathematicians German military personnel killed in World War I German Army personnel of World War I {{germany-mathematician-stub