Bernard Morin

Bernard Morin (French: [mɔʁɛ̃]; 3 March 1931 in Shanghai, China – 12 March 2018)[1] was a French mathematician, specifically a topologist.

Bernard Morin
Born(1931-03-03)March 3, 1931
Shanghai, China
DiedMarch 12, 2018(2018-03-12) (aged 87)
Paris, France
NationalityFrench
Alma materÉcole Normale Supérieure
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
Topology
InstitutionsInstitute for Advanced Study
University of Strasbourg
Doctoral advisorRené Thom
Looping animated cutaway view of Boy's surface.

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.[2] He received his Ph.D. in 1972 from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.[3][2]

Career

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 François Apéry later discovered (in 1986) another parametrization of Boy's surface, which conforms to the general method for parametrizing non-orientable surfaces.[4]

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


Morin's surface.
gollark: All manufacturers' laptops come with dead pixels or what?
gollark: You can formally verify stuff, but good luck formally verifying an entire modern software stack and also all the formal verification toolchain.
gollark: The best way, though, is to use a totally side-effect-free language. That way there may still be bugs, but they can not have any observable effect so they effectively aren't real.
gollark: The giant C runtime isn't typechecked or whatever, though.
gollark: > Which is probably never

See also

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).
  3. "Bernard Morin". Institute for Advanced Study. Retrieved 20 July 2017.
  4. Weisstein, Eric W. "Boy Surface." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/BoySurface.html

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