Boris Nikolayevich Delaunay or Delone (; 15 March 1890 – 17 July 1980) was a Soviet and Russian

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

, mountain climber, and the father of

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...

, Nikolai Borisovich Delone. He is best known for the

Delaunay triangulation In computational geometry, a Delaunay triangulation or Delone triangulation of a set of points in the plane subdivides their convex hull into triangles whose circumcircles do not contain any of the points; that is, each circumcircle has its gen ...

Biography

Boris Delone got his surname from his ancestor French Army officer de Launay, who was captured in Russia during Napoleon's invasion of 1812. De Launay was a nephew of the

Bastille The Bastille (, ) was a fortress in Paris, known as the Bastille Saint-Antoine. It played an important role in the internal conflicts of France and for most of its history was used as a state prison by the kings of France. It was stormed by a ...

governor marquis de Launay. He married a woman from the noble and stayed in Russia. When Boris was a young boy his family spent summers in the

Alps The Alps () are some of the highest and most extensive mountain ranges in Europe, stretching approximately across eight Alpine countries (from west to east): Monaco, France, Switzerland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Germany, Austria and Slovenia. ...

where he learned

mountain climbing Mountaineering, mountain climbing, or alpinism is a set of outdoor activities that involves ascending mountains. Mountaineering-related activities include traditional outdoor climbing, skiing, and traversing via ferratas that have become mounta ...

. By 1913, he became one of the top three Russian mountain climbers. After the

Russian Revolution The Russian Revolution was a period of Political revolution (Trotskyism), political and social revolution, social change in Russian Empire, Russia, starting in 1917. This period saw Russia Dissolution of the Russian Empire, abolish its mona ...

, he climbed mountains in the

Caucasus The Caucasus () or Caucasia (), is a region spanning Eastern Europe and Western Asia. It is situated between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, comprising parts of Southern Russia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. The Caucasus Mountains, i ...

and Altai. One of the mountains (4300 m) near Belukha is named after him. In the 1930s, he was among the first to receive a qualification of Master of mountain climbing of the USSR. Future

Nobel laureate The Nobel Prizes (, ) are awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Swedish Academy, the Karolinska Institutet, and the Norwegian Nobel Committee to individuals and organizations who make outstanding contributions in th ...

in physics

Igor Tamm Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm (; 8 July 1895 – 12 April 1971) was a Soviet Union, Soviet physicist who received the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov and Ilya Mikhailovich Frank, for their 1934 discovery and demon ...

was his associate in setting tourist camps in the mountains. Boris Delaunay worked in the fields of modern algebra, the

geometry of numbers Geometry of numbers is the part of number theory which uses geometry for the study of algebraic numbers. Typically, a ring of algebraic integers is viewed as a lattice (group), lattice in \mathbb R^n, and the study of these lattices provides fundam ...

. He used the results of

Evgraf Fedorov Evgraf Stepanovich Fedorov (, – 21 May 1919) was a Russian mathematician, crystallographer and mineralogist. Fedorov was born in the Russian city of Orenburg. His father was a topographical engineer. The family later moved to Saint Petersb ...

Hermann Minkowski Hermann Minkowski (22 June 1864 – 12 January 1909) was a mathematician and professor at the University of Königsberg, the University of Zürich, and the University of Göttingen, described variously as German, Polish, Lithuanian-German, o ...

Georgy Voronoy Georgy Feodosevich Voronyi (; ; 28 April 1868 – 20 November 1908) was an Imperial Russian mathematician of Ukrainians, Ukrainian descent noted for defining the Voronoi diagram. Biography Voronyi was born in the village of Zhuravka, Pyriatyn, in ...

, and others in his development of modern mathematical crystallography and general mathematical model of crystals. He invented what is now called

in 1934;

Delone set In the mathematical theory of metric spaces, -nets, -packings, -coverings, uniformly discrete sets, relatively dense sets, and Delone sets (named after Boris Delone) are several closely related definitions of well-spaced sets of points, and ...

s are also named after him. Among his best students are the mathematicians Aleksandr Aleksandrov and

Igor Shafarevich Igor Rostislavovich Shafarevich (; 3 June 1923 – 19 February 2017) was a Soviet and Russian mathematician who contributed to algebraic number theory and algebraic geometry. Outside mathematics, he wrote books and articles that criticised social ...

. Delaunay was elected the corresponding member of the

Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union The Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union was the highest scientific institution of the Soviet Union from 1925 to 1991. It united the country's leading scientists and was subordinated directly to the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union (un ...

in 1929.Boris Nikolaevich Deaunay (in Russian)
Division of Higher Geometry and Topology, Mathematics and Mechanics Department,

Moscow State University Moscow State University (MSU), officially M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University,. is a public university, public research university in Moscow, Russia. The university includes 15 research institutes, 43 faculties, more than 300 departments, a ...

. Delaunay is credited as being an organizer, in Leningrad in 1934, of the first

mathematical olympiad A mathematical olympiad is a mathematical competition where participants are examined by problem solving and may win medals depending on their performance. Usually aimed at pre-university students, much of olympiad mathematics consists of elemen ...

for high school students in the Soviet Union.S. S. Ryshkov, D. K. Faddeev and M. I. Shtogri
Boris Nikolaevich Delone (on the occasion of his eightieth birthday).
Russian Mathematical Surveys, vol. 26 (1971), pp. 199–203; p. 200

Books

* Delone, B. N.; Raikov, D. A. (1948, 1949). ''Analytic Geometry'' (2 vols.). State Technical Press. (in Russian) * Kolmogorov, Andrey Nikolaevich et al. (1969). ''Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning'', chapter ''Analytic Geometry'', by B. N. Delone. MIT Press. (translated from the Russian)

Notes

References

External links

Biography (in Russian)
on the website of the

* *
Boris Nikolaevich Delone (On his seventieth birthday)

80th Birthday - Reproduction of an article in Russian Mathematical Surveys 26 (1971) 199-203, with the permission of the London Mathematical Society
Page

Also i
PDF format
* Nikolay P. Dolbilin
''The Delone Peak'', 2010.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Delaunay, Boris 1890 births 1980 deaths 20th-century Russian mathematicians Mathematicians from Saint Petersburg Mountain climbers from the Russian Empire People from Sankt-Peterburgsky Uyezd Corresponding Members of the USSR Academy of Sciences Members of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina Academic staff of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology Moscow State University alumni Academic staff of Saint Petersburg State University Recipients of the Order of Lenin Recipients of the Order of the Red Banner of Labour Russian geometers Russian people of French descent Sportspeople from Saint Petersburg Soviet mathematicians Soviet mountain climbers Russian mountain climbers