Boris Delaunay

Boris Nikolayevich Delaunay, also written Delone (1890 to 1980), was a Soviet and Russian mathematician, mountain climber and the father of the physicist Nikolai Delone. His surname came from an ancestor, a French army officer captured in Russia during Napoleon's invasion of 1812. He worked in modern algebra and the geometry of numbers, building on the results of Evgraf Fedorov, Hermann Minkowski and Georgy Voronoy to develop a modern mathematical model of crystals. In 1934 he invented what is now called the Delaunay triangulation, and Delone sets are also named after him. He was elected a corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1929, organized the first mathematical olympiad for high school students in the Soviet Union in Leningrad in 1934, and taught students including Aleksandr Aleksandrov and Igor Shafarevich. He was also among the first Soviet mountaineers to be named Master of mountain climbing.