| Bernard Morin | |
| Birth Date: | 3 March 1931 |
| Birth Place: | Shanghai, China |
| Death Place: | Paris, France |
| Nationality: | French |
| Field: | Mathematics Topology |
| Work Institutions: | Institute for Advanced Study University of Strasbourg |
| Alma Mater: | École Normale Supérieure Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique |
| Doctoral Advisor: | René Thom |
Bernard Morin (pronounced as /fr/; 3 March 1931 in Shanghai, China – 12 March 2018)[1] was a French mathematician, specifically a topologist.
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]
Morin was a member of the group that first exhibited an eversion of the sphere,[4] i.e., a homotopy 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 (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.[5]
Morin worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Most of his career, though, he spent at the University of Strasbourg.
Morin's surface.
George K. Francis & Bernard Morin (1980) "Arnold Shapiro's Eversion of the Sphere", Mathematical Intelligencer 2(4):200 - 3.