Boris Delaunay facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Boris Delaunay
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| Born |
Boris Nikolayevich Delaunay
15 March 1890 |
| Died | 17 July 1980 (aged 90) |
| Known for | Delaunay triangulation, Mountain climbing |
| Scientific career | |
| Doctoral advisor | Dmitry Grave Georgy Voronoy |
| Doctoral students | Aleksandr Danilovich Aleksandrov Nikolay Petrovich Dolbilin Igor Shafarevich Isaak Yaglom |
Boris Nikolayevich Delaunay (born March 15, 1890 – died July 17, 1980) was a famous Russian and Soviet mathematician. He was also a very skilled mountain climber! You might know his name from something called "Delaunay triangulation," which is a special way to connect points in geometry. He was also the father of another well-known scientist, Nikolai Borisovich Delone.
His name can be spelled "Delone" or "Delaunay." "Delone" is how his name sounds in Russian, and he used it later in his life. "Delaunay" is the French way of spelling it, which he used in his earlier works.
Contents
A Life of Math and Mountains
Boris Delone's family name came from a French army officer. This officer was captured in Russia during Napoleon's invasion way back in 1812. He decided to stay in Russia and married a Russian noblewoman.
Early Life and Mountain Climbing
When Boris was a boy, his family spent their summers in the Alps. This is where he first learned to love mountain climbing. By 1913, he was one of the top three mountain climbers in all of Russia!
After the Russian Revolution, he continued to climb mountains in the Caucasus and Altai regions. There's even a mountain (about 4,300 meters tall) near Belukha named after him! In the 1930s, he was one of the first people in the Soviet Union to earn the title of "Master of Mountain Climbing." He even worked with Igor Tamm, who later won a Nobel Prize in physics, to set up camps for tourists in the mountains.
Contributions to Mathematics
Boris Delaunay worked on many important areas of mathematics. He studied modern algebra and the geometry of numbers. He used ideas from other famous mathematicians like Evgraf Fedorov and Georgy Voronoy.
Delaunay Triangulation
One of his most famous inventions is called Delaunay triangulation, which he created in 1934. This is a special way to connect a set of points with triangles, making sure that no point is inside the circle that passes through the corners of any triangle. It's used in many fields today, like computer graphics and mapping. Special groups of points called Delone sets are also named after him.
He also helped develop mathematical crystallography, which is the study of how crystals are formed using math. He created a general mathematical model for crystals.
Teaching and Recognition
Delaunay was a great teacher, and some of his best students became famous mathematicians themselves, like Aleksandr Aleksandrov and Igor Shafarevich.
In 1929, he was chosen as a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. He is also known for organizing the very first mathematical olympiad for high school students in the Soviet Union. This event took place in Leningrad in 1934 and helped encourage young people to get excited about math.
Books
Boris Delaunay also wrote books about mathematics:
- Delone, B. N.; Raikov, D. A. (1948, 1949). Analytic Geometry (2 volumes). (in Russian)
- Kolmogorov, Andrey Nikolaevich et al. (1969). Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning, which includes a chapter on Analytic Geometry by B. N. Delone.
