Boris Delaunay

Boris Nikolayevich Delaunay or DeloneTemplate:Efn (dəlonɛ,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Template:Langx; 15 March 1890 – 17 July 1980) was a Soviet and Russian mathematician, mountain climber, and the father of physicist, Nikolai Borisovich Delone. He is best known for the Delaunay triangulation.

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 governor marquis de Launay. He married a woman from the noble Template:Ill and stayed in Russia.<ref>Memoirs by Boris Rozenfeld, p. 61 (in Russian).</ref>

When Boris was a young boy his family spent summers in the Alps where he learned mountain climbing.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> By 1913, he became one of the top three Russian mountain climbers. After the Russian Revolution, he climbed mountains in the Caucasus 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.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Future Nobel laureate in physics Igor Tamm was his associate in setting tourist camps in the mountains.

Boris Delaunay worked in the fields of modern algebra, the geometry of numbers. He used the results of Evgraf Fedorov, Hermann Minkowski, Georgy Voronoy, and others in his development of modern mathematical crystallography and general mathematical model of crystals.<ref>Template:Citation</ref> He invented what is now called Delaunay triangulation in 1934;<ref>Template:Citation</ref> Delone sets are also named after him. Among his best students are the mathematicians Aleksandr Aleksandrov and Igor Shafarevich.

Delaunay was elected the corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union in 1929.<ref name="bio">Boris Nikolaevich Deaunay (in Russian), Division of Higher Geometry and Topology, Mathematics and Mechanics Department, Moscow State University.</ref> Delaunay is credited as being an organizer, in Leningrad in 1934, of the first mathematical olympiad for high school students in the Soviet Union.<ref name="bio"/><ref>S. S. Ryshkov, D. K. Faddeev and M. I. Shtogrin Boris Nikolaevich Delone (on the occasion of his eightieth birthday). Russian Mathematical Surveys, vol. 26 (1971), pp. 199–203; p. 200</ref>

Selected publications

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)

Oral history

• О том, как спасся от расстрела, устроил сталинскую премию за 5 кг мясного жира и основал советский альпинизм ("How [I] escaped execution, arranged a Stalin prize for 5 kg of salo and founded Soviet mountaineering")

External links

• Biography (in Russian) on the website of the Moscow State University
• Template:MacTutor Biography
• Template:MathGenealogy
• 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 Pages 199, 200, 201, 202, 203; Also in PDF format.
• Nikolay P. Dolbilin, The Delone Peak, 2010.