Georges François Paul Marie Matheron (2 December 1930 – 7 August 2000) was a French mathematician and civil engineer of mines, known as the founder of geostatistics and a co-founder (together with Jean Serra) of mathematical morphology.

Matheron graduated from École Polytechnique and later Ecole des Mines de Paris, where he studied mathematics, physics and probability theory (as a student of Paul Lévy).

He did not disclose his primary data set and worked mostly with symbols rather than real measured values such test results for lead and silver in Matheron's core samples.

Primary data would have allowed him to assess whether or not lead and silver grades departed from the lognormal distribution, or displayed spatial dependence along core samples in his borehole.

In 1964, Matheron was supervising the PhD thesis of Jean Serra, dedicated to quantifying the ore properties of the iron deposit of Lorraine.

The theoretical analysis of this transform led Matheron to derive and investigate the concepts of erosion, dilation, opening and closing, which became known later as the basic morphological operators.

It has since evolved into a theory and method that is applied in a variety of image processing problems and tasks, and is researched worldwide[1] (main article: Mathematical morphology).

Each year IAMG selects a Georges Matheron Lecturer who is a scientist with proven research ability in the field of spatial statistics or mathematical morphology.

In 1968, the Paris School of Mines created the Centre de Morphologie Mathématique, located in Fontainebleau, France, and named Matheron its first director.