Good morning! Today’s math is Voronoi Diagrams, but I’ll lead into it with some Geometry. Suppose you have two points A and B, and wonder which points on the plane are closer to A and which are closer to B. Maybe A and B are schools, and this is for figuring out districts, or maybe they are pizza places and you’re wondering where to order from. It turns out that the border between the two regions is on the perpendicular bisector of A and B.
But what if there are three points? It’s a little more complicated, but the boundaries are still made up from the perpendicular bisectors of the different pairs of points. And this idea continues even when there are more points, as this picture shows.
Diagrams like these are called Voronoi Diagrams named after Ukrainian mathematician Georgy Feodosevich Voronoy (also written as Georgii Voronoi).
He was born in the village of Zhuravka in the north central part of Ukraine on April 28, 1868, and while he was still in the equivalent of high school he solved and published the result of a problem in algebra. He then went to the University of St. Petersburg in Russia, first as an undergraduate but eventually as a doctoral student under Andrey Markov (himself well known because of something called Markov Chains, which are ways of calculating probabilities). Both his Master’s thesis and his doctoral thesis were awarded the Bunyakovsky prize for outstanding work in mathematics by the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences.
Voronoy became a professor at the University of Warsaw in Poland, where he continued to do research and also supervise students: one of his students was Wacław Sierpiński, for whom Sierpinski triangles are named. When he was only 40 years old he developed severe gallstones, and passed away on November 20, 1908.
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