Georgi Feodosjewitsch Voronoi

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Georgi Voronoi

Georgy Voronoy ( Russian Георгий Феодосьевич Вороной , scientific. Transliteration Georgy Feodos'evič Voronoj ; Ukrainian Георгій Феодосійович Вороний / Heorhiy Woronyj * April 16 . Jul / 28. April  1868 greg. In Schurawka , Poltava Governorate , Russian Empire ; † 7 November. jul. / 20th November  1908 greg. in Warsaw , Congress Poland ) was a Russian mathematician of Ukrainian origin.

Life

Voronoi grew up in Shuravka on the Udaj in today's Varwa Rajon of the Ukrainian Oblast Chernihiv , and neighboring places. His father Theodosii Voronoi was a professor of Russian literature at the Pryluky high school , 18 km from Shuravka. He adhered to progressive ideas and, as a student in Kiev, taught workers and low-wage earners in Sunday schools. While still a student at the high school in Pryluky, he published his first mathematical work. Voronoi studied from 1885 at the University of Saint Petersburg with Julian Sochotski (1842-1927), Alexander Nikolajewitsch Korkin and Andrei Andrejewitsch Markow . Even then he was particularly interested in number theory . There he received his doctorate in 1889 (candidate title) on the Bernoulli numbers . He then taught from 1889 to 1894 as a mathematics teacher at the Progymnasium in Peterhof, while at the same time researching at the University of St. Petersburg. His diploma thesis from 1894 was on cubic irrationalities (algebraic numbers that are connected with solutions of irreducible equations of the 3rd degree) and his habilitation from 1896 (defended in 1897, referred to as doctoral thesis in Russia) on the Voronoi algorithm for successive calculation of best Diophantine approximations ( About a generalization of the continued fraction algorithm ), where he extended the principle of continued fractions with astonishing results from quadratic to the investigation of cubic irrationalities. Both works received the Bunjakowski Prize of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences . Since 1894 he was a professor at the University of Warsaw , which was then Russian. He stayed there for the remainder of his career, specifically lecturing on probability theory and number theory. In 1898 he also became a professor at the Warsaw Polytechnic, where he was later dean of the Faculty of Mechanics. When the University and the Polytechnic in Warsaw were temporarily closed from 1905 to 1907 due to the turmoil of the revolution, he was at the Donskoi Polytechnic in Novocherkassk . From 1908 he taught again in Warsaw. But he died soon afterwards. In addition to a revision due to his teaching activities (at times he was the only mathematics professor), there was a gall bladder. The doctors forbade him from any further work, and the last time he was to recover was in his hometown of Schurawka, but had a relapse after returning to Warsaw.

In total, Woronoi published only 12 papers on algebraic and analytic number theory, the geometry of numbers and the summation of divergent series, but these had a great influence. His textbook on differential and integral calculus was published posthumously (1909 to 1911 in Warsaw and 1914 in Kiev).

He supervised Wacław Sierpiński's doctoral thesis . In 1904 he published two of his works on the III. International Congress of Mathematicians in Heidelberg and met Hermann Minkowski there . Delone and Minkowski ranked him among the founders of the geometry of numbers. He published about it in two large papers, on which he said he worked (in the foreword) for twelve years, in Crelles Journal (Journal for Pure and Applied Mathematics) in 1908 and 1909, the year of his death. Today he is mainly through the Voronoi diagram known, which he treated in his work of 1908 in the n-dimensional case, but which was already known.

2 hryvnia coin issued in 2008 on the centenary of death

He had been married to Olia (or Olha) Krytska since 1891 and had six children (two sons, four daughters). His wife worked as a midwife and died in 1939 after the family had to leave the place during the collectivization campaign in 1932, which also destroyed the crypt in which Woronoi was buried with his father. Voronoy's son Oleksander was a doctor who experimented on the treatment of tumors with electric current. He was arrested in 1938 and died in one of Stalin's labor camps. His other son, Jurij Voronyj, was one of the first to perform a transplant in 1933 (the patient only survived a kidney transplant for two days), but was unable to continue his work under the political conditions at the time.

Voronoy's estate is in the National Library of Ukraine . A plaque and an exhibition room at the school in Shuravka (Zhuravka), which is named after him, commemorates him. The family home no longer exists. The village school was housed in it until it was demolished in 1993. The street on which the house stood still bears the name Voronoi.

Fonts

literature

  • BN Delone : The St. Petersburg school of number theory (= History of Mathematics. Vol. 26). American Mathematical Society, Providence 2005, ISBN 0-8218-3457-6 (Russian original: Moscow / Leningrad 1947).
  • Thomas Liebling, Lionel Pournin: Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay triangulations: ubiquitous Siamese twins, Documenta Mathematica, Extra Volume ISMP, 2012, pp. 419-431, pdf

Web links

Commons : Georgy Voronoy  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biography of Syta, de Weygaert, Preprint 2009, see web links
  2. ↑ In the English-language biography of Syta and de Weygaert referred to as a master's thesis . It was part of the habilitation.
  3. ↑ The algorithm was rediscovered in 1938 by Günter Bergmann , then Günter Bullig, and further developed in 1985 by Johannes Buchmann .
  4. ↑ The results formed the basis for the monograph by Delone and Faddejew The theory of irrationalities of the third degree , AMS 1964.
  5. ↑ Later he received support from Professor IR Braitsev
  6. ^ Delone The St. Petersburg School in Number Theory , AMS 2005
  7. ↑ It can be up to Descartes , Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet traced
personal data
SURNAME Voronoi, Georgi Feodosjewitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Voronoj, Georgij Fedosevič; Voronoĭ, Georgiĭ Feodosʹevich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian mathematician of Ukrainian origin
DATE OF BIRTH April 28, 1868
PLACE OF BIRTH Shuravka , Poltava Governorate , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH November 20, 1908
Place of death Warsaw , Congress Poland