The article is dedicated to Boris Grigorievich Galerkin, one of the greatest engineers of the first half of the 20th century, academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, who in 1899 graduated from the mechanical department of the St. Petersburg Technological Institute of Emperor Nicholas I. He started his career as a scientist at the Polytechnic Institute, among such mechanics scholars as V.L. Kearney-Chev, I.V. Meshchersky, S.P. Tymoshenko, A.P. Van der Fleet. He founded the Institute of Mechanics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in the last years of his life. He won the Stalin Prize in 1942.