Aleksey Nikolayevich Krylov was born on August 3 O.S., 1863 in Visyaga village near the town of Alatyr, Simbirsk Governorate, Russian Empire (today Krylovo, Chuvashia) to the family of a retired artillery officer.

His father, Nikolay Aleksandrovich Krylov (1830-1911), was the local landlord and vice-Marshal of Nobility, but had relatively liberal views and later led the zemskaya uprava (the Executive Board of the Zemstvo self-government system) in Alatyr.

In 1898 Krylov received a Gold Medal from the British Royal Institution of Naval Architects, the first time the prize was awarded to a foreigner.

After 1900 Krylov actively collaborated with Stepan Makarov, admiral and maritime scientist, working on the ship floodability problem.

After the October Revolution he peacefully transferred the ROPiT merchant fleet to the Soviet government and continued to work for the Russian Navy.

Aleksey Nikolaevich Krylov died in Leningrad (i.e. Saint Petersburg) on October 26, 1945, shortly after the end of World War II.

He was awarded the Stalin Prize (1941), three Orders of Lenin, Hero of Socialist Labor (1943), and was an academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences (after 1916).

His daughter Anna married famous physicist Pyotr Kapitsa, discoverer of superfluidity and Nobel Prize in Physics winner.

Their children included geographer Andrey Kapitsa, (1931–2011), who discovered Lake Vostok, the largest subglacial lake in Antarctica 4,000 meters below the continent's ice cap,[3] and Sergey Kapitsa (1928–2012), physicist and demographer, host of the popular and long-running Russian scientific TV show, Evident, but Incredible.