Blind Mathematician: Bernard Morin by Bibhuprasad Mohapatra
Blind Mathematician: Bernard Morin by Bibhuprasad Mohapatra
“A sighted mathematician generally works by sitting around scribbling on paper: According to one legend, the maid of a famous mathematician, when asked what her employer did all day, reported that he wrote on pieces of paper, crumpled them up, and threw them into the wastebasket. So how do blind mathematicians work?”
- This fascinating notice or excerpt published by the American Mathematical Association (AMS) on blind mathematicians. The same extract focuses in particular on Bernard Morin.
He is a pioneering French mathematician, specifically a topologist and geometer. He was born in Sanghai city, China in 1931. His father was a French citizen and banker who worked for a bank in Sanghai. He has been blind since age 6 due to glaucoma and was taken to France for medical treatment. He returned to Sanghai, but suffered detached retinas and was totally blind. Morin returned to France and educated in schools for the blind until age fifteen, when he went into the regular education system. He studied philosophy for a few years before switched to Mathematics. His blindness did not prevent him from having a successful career in mathematics. In 1957, he began his career as a researcher at ‘The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique’ (The National Centre for Scientific Research). He earned Ph.D. in 1972.
Morin was a part of a group that first demonstrated 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, 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 (named after German Mathematician Werner Boy (1879-1914)) in 1978. His graduate student François Apéry (born in 1950, son of mathematician Roger Apery) later discovered (in 1986) another parametrization of Boy's surface, which conforms to the general method for parametrizing non-orient able surfaces."Our spatial imagination is formed by manipulating objects, you act on objects with your hands not your eyes"-said Morin in discussing his work.
He spent most of his career teaching at the University of Strasbourg and retired in 1999. Morin also worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, USA.
I would like to quote from the AMS notice:
"One thing that is difficult about visualizing geometric objects is that one tends to see only the outside of the objects, not the inside, which might be very complicated. By thinking carefully about two things at once, Morin has developed the ability to pass from outside to inside, or from one “room” to another. This kind of spatial imagination seems to be less dependent on visual experiences than on tactile ones."
On account of being blind, he seemed to have a different perception of objects, including their 'insides'. Rather, the point is that he apparently does mathematics in a different way, at times 'seeing' things that the rest of us cannot see. Thus, we seem to have a case of a difference in perceptual conditions actively making a significant difference for the kind of mathematical knowledge produced.
He never felt inferior to other mathematicians being blind. It is interesting fact that he himself claims that being blind was an asset he had over other mathematicians on this specific problem.
References:-
1. “Blind Mathematicians” by Bibhuprasad Mohapatra, Science Reporter, September 2014
2. Wikipedia
Article by :
Shri Bibhuprasad Mohapatra
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