Boris Galerkin

Boris Grigoryevich Galjorkin (Russian Борис Григорьевич Галёркин, scientific transliteration Boris Galerkin Grigor'evič, often transcribed as Galerkin; * 20 Februarjul / March 4 1871greg in Polotsk, Belarus today, .. † July 12, 1945 in Leningrad ) was a Soviet engineer and mathematician.

Galjorkin attended school in Minsk and studied from 1893 at the Polytechnic Institute in St. Petersburg. To finance his studies, he worked part-time as a private tutor and as a technical draftsman. At the same time he became a member of the Russian Social Democrats. After graduating in 1899 he worked in a locomotive factory in Kharkiv and from 1903 as an engineer in the construction of a railway line in Manchuria. End of the year he was in St. Petersburg, where he was a senior engineer in a boiler factory. At the same time he was still active for the Social Democrats and organized an engineering union. In 1907 he was convicted for his political activities to one and a half years in prison.

In prison he began to deal with civil engineering and visited after discharge in 1908 from 1909 until the outbreak of the First World War sites and monuments in Central Europe and Sweden. 1908 was his first release ( a long treatise on statics, which he had written in prison) and he began to give lectures at the Polytechnic. From 1920 he was Professor of Engineering Mechanics at the Polytechnic. In 1922 he moved to the Chair of Civil Engineering. He also taught at the Leningrad Institute of Railway Engineering and at the State University in Leningrad. In 1939, he was Professor and Head of Civil Engineering at the newly established Military Engineering Technical University and was awarded the rank of general. He was conducting in the Commission for the construction of defenses for Leningrad, was then evacuated to Moscow and was in the Commission of Military Engineering of the Academy of Sciences. Galjorkin was from 1940 until his death chairman of the Institute of Mechanics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg.

The Galerkin approach and the Galerkin method is an approximate method for the solution of partial differential equations and associated variational problems. He led this 1915. He is also known for his work on shell theory, about which he wrote a monograph in 1937.

He has also been involved as a structural engineer for many projects of hydroelectric power stations in the Soviet Union, for example, in 1929 the Dnieper dam and power plant. For steel-framed, he was often called in, for which he was regarded as a specialist, since he was one of the first in Russia, built in 1913 has a larger steel-framed building in a factory in St. Petersburg.

In 1928 he became a corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and in 1936 a full member.

The 1998 discovered asteroid ( 22611 ) Galerkin was named after him.