Person: Galerkin, Boris Grigorievich
Boris Grigorievich Galerkin was a Soviet mathematician and engineer best known for his method of approximate integration.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- He attended secondary school in Minsk, then in 1893 he entered the Petersburg Technological Institute.
- Here he studied mathematics and engineering but he needed to make money to survive so at first he took on private tutoring, then from 1896 he worked as a designer.
- After graduating from the Technological Institute in 1899 he got a job at the Kharkov Locomotive Plant.
- In 1903 Galerkin went to St Petersburg and there he became engineering manager at the Northern Mechanical and Boiler Plant.
- From 1909 Galerkin began to study building sites and construction works throughout Europe.
- In the same year he began teaching at the Petersburg Technological Institute.
- His first publication on longitudinal curvature also appeared in 1909, work which carried on from beginnings which had been laid by Euler.
- This paper was highly relevant to his study of construction sites since the results were applied to the construction of bridges and frames for buildings.
- His visits around European construction sites ended around 1914 but his academic work then turned to the area for which he is today best known, namely the method of approximate integration of differential equations known as the Galerkin method.
- In 1920 Galerkin was promoted to Head of Structural Mechanics at the Petersburg Technological Institute.
- By this time he also held two chairs, one in elasticity at the Leningrad Institute of Communications Engineers and one in structural mechanics at Leningrad University.
- In 1921 the St Petersburg Mathematical Society was reopened (it had closed in 1917 due to the Russian Revolution) as the Petrograd Physical and Mathematical Society.
- Galerkin played a major role in the Society along with Steklov, Sergei Bernstein, Friedmann and others.
- Other work for which Galerkin is famous is his work on thin elastic plates.
- His major monograph on this topic Thin Elastic Plates was published in 1937.
- From 1940 until his death, Galerkin was head of the Institute of Mechanics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
- Galerkin was a consultant in the planning and building of many of the Soviet Union's largest hydrostations.
- In 1929, in connection with the building of the Dnepr dam and hydroelectric station, Galerkin investigated stress in dams and breast walls with trapezoidal profile.
- His results were used in planning the dam.
Born 4 March 1871, Polotsk, Belarus. Died 12 June 1945, Moscow, USSR.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Analysis, Origin Belarus
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
-
- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
