Georgy Voronoy

Georgy Feodosevich Voronoy (; ; 28 April 1868 – 20 November 1908) was an Imperial Russian mathematician of Ukrainian descent noted for defining the Voronoi diagram.

Biography Voronoy was born in the village of Zhuravka, Pyriatyn, in the Poltava Governorate, which was a part of the Russian Empire at that time and is in Varva Raion, Chernihiv Oblast, Ukraine.

Beginning in 1889, Voronoy studied at Saint Petersburg University, where he was a student of Andrey Markov. In 1894 he defended his master's thesis On algebraic integers depending on the roots of an equation of third degree. In the same year, Voronoy became a professor at the University of Warsaw, where he worked on continued fractions. In 1897 he defended his doctoral thesis On a generalisation of a continuous fraction. He was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1904 at Heidelberg.

When he was only 40 years of age, Voronoy began having stomach problems. He wrote in his diary:

Following a severe gall bladder attack, Voronoy died on 20 November 1908.

Works

Voronoy introduced the concept of what we today call Voronoi diagrams or tessellations. They are used in many areas of science, such as the analysis of spatially distributed data, having become an important topic in geophysics, meteorology, condensed matter physics, and Lie groups.

These tessellations are widely used in many areas of computer graphics, from architecture to film making and video games. Blender 3D includes a Voronoi texture generator as one of its main sources of randomly generated images, that can be applied as textures for many different uses.

Legacy

Among his students was Wacław Sierpiński (Ph.D. at Jagiellonian University in 1906). Although he was not formally the doctoral advisor of Boris Delaunay (Ph.D. at Kyiv University), his influence on the latter earns him the right to be considered so.

In 2008 Ukraine released two-hryvnia coins commemorating the centenary of Voronoy's death.

Family

In 1895 he had a son with his wife Olga Mytrofanivna, named Yurii Voronyi, who became a prominent transplant surgeon who performed the world's first human-to-human kidney transplant in 1933, volunteered for the army of Central Council of Ukraine, and fought in the Battle of Kruty. His daughter Mariia Vorona-Vasylenko became a teacher of Ukrainian language.