Boris Grigoryevich Galjorkin

Boris Galjorkin

Boris Grigorjewitsch Galjorkin ( Russian Борис Григорьевич Галёркин , scientific transliteration Boris Grigor'evič Galërkin , often transcribed as Galerkin ; * 20 February ^July / 4 March  1871 ^greg. In Len † July 12, 1945 in Leningrad , now Belarus ) was a Soviet engineer and mathematician.

Galjorkin attended school in Minsk and studied from 1893 at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic. To finance his studies, he also worked as a private teacher 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 on the construction of a railway line in Manchuria . At the end of the year he was in Saint Petersburg, where he was a senior engineer in a steam boiler factory. At the same time he was still active for the Social Democrats and organized an engineering union. In 1907 he was sentenced to one and a half years in prison for his political activities.

In prison he began to deal with civil engineering and, after his release in 1908, visited construction sites and structures in Central Europe and Sweden from 1909 until the beginning of the First World War. In 1908 his first publication followed (a long treatise on structural engineering that he had written in prison) and he began to give lectures at the Polytechnic. From 1920 he was professor for technical mechanics at the Polytechnic. In 1922 he switched to the chair of civil engineering. He also taught at the Leningrad Institute of Railway Engineering and the Leningrad State University. In 1939 he became professor and head of civil engineering at the newly founded Military Engineering University and received the rank of general. He was a head of the Defense Construction Commission for Leningrad, then evacuated to Moscow and served on the Military Engineering Commission of the Academy of Sciences. From 1940 until his death, Galjorkin was head of the Mechanics Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg.

The Galerkin approach or the Galerkin method is an approximation method for solving partial differential equations or associated variation problems . He introduced this in 1915. He is also known for his work on the shell theory, on which he wrote a monograph in 1937.

As a structural engineer, he was involved in many hydropower plant projects in the Soviet Union, for example in 1929 on the Dnepr dam and power plant. He was also often called in for steel frame buildings, for which he was considered a specialist since 1913, when he was one of the first in Russia to erect a large steel frame structure 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. He received the Order of Lenin (1941, 1945) and the Stalin Prize (1942).

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

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Boris Grigorjewitsch Galjorkin. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
• Biography of the Saint-Petersburg State Polytechnical University (English)