Voronoi diagrams – inventor, method, applications

The article presents the person and works of Georgy Voronoi (1868–1908), the inventor of an original method of diagrams, a student of the famous mathematician Andrey Markov. Georgy Voronoi graduated from the Department of Physics and Mathematics at the University of St. Petersburg, and subsequently worked as a professor of mathematics at the Imperial University of Warsaw. One of his students was the future out-standing Polish mathematician Wacław Sierpiński. In his brief lifetime G. Voronoi published several important scientic articles on number theory. In an almost 100 page paper in French published in 1908 he described a method of diagrams, or polygons, which became known as the method of Voronoi diagrams.In the digital age this method and its modications found new applications. The entry “Voronoi” is getting more popular on the Internet, and the method of Voronoi diagrams and its modications are widely described in handbooks and scientic articles. The article presents application of the method in the most popular com-puter programs from the Geographic Information System (GIS) group and presents examples of its usage in research on geographic space in various scientic disciplines