The enigmatic Boy surface
The story
A legend tells that around 1900, the German mathematician David Hilbert asked his student Werner Boy to prove something was impossible, that is, that a certain mathematical surface - the projective plane - could not be placed smoothly, that is, without corners or sharp edges, in three-dimensional space.
Instead, Boy's dissertation showed that there was no such impossibility by describing two explicit smooth ways of placing the projective plane in three-dimensional space. One of these ways is what we now call the "Boy surface"; and the model of it that I made by linking wire (and following Boy's instructions) is in the protagonist of the movie. The other way is less well known and will appear on these pages soon.
Werner Boy was born in 1879 and died in 1914, in World War I.
