ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Voronoi formula

Imagine you live in a big town with lots of houses and you want to find out which house is closest to you. You would probably use a map and measure the distance between your house and each other house in the town.

Now imagine if you had a lot of points on a sheet of paper and you wanted to create shapes around each point such that every point is inside its own shape and each point’s shape has straight sides. That’s what the Voronoi formula does. It helps draw these shapes, which are called Voronoi cells, and they are named after a Russian mathematician named Georgy Voronoy.

The formula itself can be a little complicated, but the idea is that it uses the distances between points to draw the shapes. It works by finding the midpoint between each point and its nearest neighbor, and then drawing a line that bisects that distance. This line continues until it meets another Voronoi cell or the edge of the paper.

The resulting shapes can be very useful in many fields, like geography, where they can be used to divide land into different areas based on the distance from different points of interest. They can also be used in computer science to help with things like clustering data points.

Overall, the Voronoi formula is a way to draw shapes around points based on the distance between them, and it can be used to solve many real-world problems.