Georgy Voronoy

Georgy Feodosevich Voronoy (Russian: Гео́ргий Феодо́сьевич Вороно́й; 28 April 1868 – 20 November 1908) was a Russian mathematician noted for defining the Voronoi diagram.

Voronoy was born in the village of Zhuravka, Pyriatyn, in the Poltava Governorate, which was a part of the Russian Empire at that time and is in Varva Raion, Chernihiv Oblast, Ukraine.

From 1889, Voronoy studied at Saint Petersburg University, where he was a student of Andrey Markov. In 1894 he defended his master's thesis On algebraic integers depending on the roots of an equation of third degree.In the same year, Voronoy became a professor at the University of Warsaw, where he worked on continued fractions.In 1897, he defended his doctoral thesis On a generalisation of a continuous fraction. He was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1904 at Heidelberg.

Following a severe illness, Voronoy died on November 20, 1908.

Among his students was Wacław Sierpiński (Ph.D. at Jagiellonian University in 1906). Although he was not formally the doctoral advisor of Boris Delaunay (Ph.D. at Kiev University), his influence on the latter earns him the right to be considered so.

In 2008, Ukraine released two-hryvnia coins commemorating the centenary of Voronoy's death.

His son Yuri Voronoy became a prominent transplant surgeon who performed the world's first human-to-human kidney transplant in 1933.