Georgiy Voronoї
was born in the village Zhuravka (now Varva District, Chernihiv Region of
Ukraine) on April 16(28), 1868. He was graduated from the Pryluky Gimnasia
(High School) in 1885, and from the St.Petersburg University in 1889. He
was left at the university to prepare his Master thesis. After defending
the thesis in 1894 he became a Professor of the Warsaw University. From autumn
of 1898, G.Voronoї also became Professor of the Warsaw Polytechnical
Institute where he was a Dean of Mechanics Faculty. Voronoї defended his
doctorate thesis in 1897, and in 1907 he was elected a Correspondence Member
of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences. In 1905-1907, both Warsaw University
and Warsaw Polytechnical Institute were closed because of revolutionary
events. At that time Donskoi Polytechnical Institute was founded in Novocherkassk
and Voronoї worked there as a Dean of the Mechanics Faculty.
Georgiy Voronoї kept ties with Zhuravka along all his life. He came there
every year during summer vacations, there he thought about his research
papers. Voronoї suffered from a disease of the gallbladder, in autumn
of 1908 his disease passed on to the acute form, and Georgiy Voronoї died
on November 7(20), 1908. He was buried in Zhuravka according to his
last will.
Scientific heritadge
G. Voronoї worked mainly
in the field of the Number Theory. His scientific publications
started several new directions of research in analytic number theory,
algebraic number theory, theory of functions, he essentially contributed
to geometry of numbers, a field introduced by H.Minkowski. His
thorough investigation of the Dirichlet-Voronoi domain opened
a broad range of applications in
science and technology. Likewise,
his investigations of perfect forms were a significant contribution
to the theory of quadratic forms and greatly stimulated the research in
this field of pure mathematics. But only in our time the real significance
of his works became fully elucidated. His works gained considerable
importance in the last thirty years due to development of many modern fields
of science and the usage of "Voronoi diagrams" in many domains.
The Complete Voronoї Works (in three volumes) were published
by the Institute of Mathematics of Ukraine in 1952-53.
Voronoi diagrams were introduced to theoretical computer science
in the middle of the 1970s. Meanwhile, the Voronoi diagram has become so
ubiquitous in geometric algorithms design that some people date the birth
of computational geometry to this event. A good percentage of papers in the
computational geometry literature is directly or indirectly concerned with
Voronoi diagrams and their related structures. They used now in different
scientific investigations from microbiology to cosmos, this mathematical
object is used in hundreds of articles and a number of comprehensive monographs,
just to mention the book by A.Okabe, B. Boots, K. Sugihara
and Sung Nok Chiu "Spatial Tessellations: Concepts and Applications
of Voronoi Diagrams” (Wiley, 2000, second ed.,672 pp.).
Extraordinary popularity of
Voronoi diagrams does not diminish the significance of his other ideas
and results. Almost each of his works has now its continuation.
VD-conferences, devoted to Voronoi diagrams:
a) 1st
International Symposium on Voronoi Diagrams in Science and Engineering
(ISVD 2004),
September, 2004 University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
http://www.simplex.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~vd2004/index.html
b) 2nd International Symposium on Voronoi Diagrams in Science
and Engineering (ISVD 2005), October 2005,
Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea
http://voronoi.hanyang.ac.kr/vd2005/
c) Workshop " The World a Jigsaw: Tessellations in the Sciences”,
March 2006, Lorentz Center, Leiden, Netherlands
http://www.lorentzcenter.nl/lc/web/2006/169/info.php3?wsid=169
d) 3rd International Symposium on Voronoi Diagrams (ISVD 2006),
July 2006, Calgary, Canada
http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~marina/VD06/
e) 4th International Symposium on Voronoi Diagrams (ISVD 2007),
July, 2007 University of Glamorgan, Wales, UK
http://www.comp.glam.ac.uk/GIS/ISVD07/
The Voronoї conferences, devoted
to the Number Theory and Spatial Tessellations held in
Kyiv, Ukraine.
The Institute of Mathematics
of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine together with some others
scientific and educational institutions of Ukraine organized
three International Voronoї conferences
(1993, 1998, 2003) . Web pages of the last two of them are:
http://www.imath.kiev.ua/~vo/voronoi.html
http://www.imath.kiev.ua/~vo/voronoi/first-en.html
A special volume (in two books) Voronoї’s Impact on Modern Science was issued
by the Institute of Mathematics in 1998.
http://www.imath.kiev.ua/~syta/vorbook.html
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