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.
Morin worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Most of his career, though, he spent at the University of Strasbourg.
Famous quotes containing the word bernard:
“Man may have his opinion as to the relative importance of feeding his body and nourishing his soul, but he is allowed by Nature to have no opinion whatever as to the need for feeding the body before the soul can think of anything but the body’s hunger.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)