Bernard Morin

Who is Bernard Morin?

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 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 in 1978. His graduate student François Apéry later discovered 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.