Werner Boy
German mathematician (1879-1914) · Germany · On the map · Academics · Died at 35
Werner Boy was a German mathematician. He was the discoverer and eponym of Boy's surface - a three-dimensional projection of the real projective plane without singularities, the first of its kind.
Werner Boy is read about 8 times a day, in 12 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 19 June 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 60 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?Also in Deutsch
Media & music
About this person
He discovered it in 1901 after his thesis adviser, David Hilbert, asked him to prove that it was not possible to immerse the real projective plane in three-dimensional space. Boy sketched several models of the surface, and discovered that it could have 3-fold rotational symmetry, but was unable to find a parametric model for the surface. It was not until 1978 that Bernard Morin found the first parametrisation, with the aid of computers.
