Boris Delaunay

Who was Boris Delaunay?

Boris Nikolaevich Delaunay or Delone was one of the first Russian mountain climbers and a Soviet/Russian mathematician, and the father of physicist Nikolai Borisovich Delone.

The spelling Delone is a straightforward transliteration from Cyrillic he often used in recent publications, while Delaunay is French version he used in the early French and German publications.

Boris Delone got his surname from his ancestor French Army officer De Launay, who was captured in Russia during Napoleon's invasion of 1812. De Launay was a nephew of the Bastille governor marquis de Launay, married a woman from the Tukhachevsky noble family, and stayed in Russia.

When Boris was a young boy his family spent summers in the Alps where he learned mountain climbing. By 1913, he became one of the top three Russian mountain climbers. After the Russian revolution, he climbed mountains in the Caucasus and Altai. One of the mountains near Belukha is named after him. In the 1930s, he was among the first to receive a qualification of Master of mountain climbing of the USSR. Future Nobel laureate in physics Igor Tamm was his associate in setting tourist camps in the mountains.