Name Bernard Morin | Role Mathematician | |
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Bernard Morin ([moʁẽ]; born 1931) is a French mathematician, specifically a topologist, 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. 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 Francois Apery later discovered (in 1986) 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. Most of his career, though, he spent at the University of Strasbourg.