20 February 1871] 1871 in Polotsk, Vitebsk Governorate, Russian Empire, now part of Belarus, to Jewish[1][2] parents, Girsh-Shleym (Hirsh-Shleym) Galerkin and Perla Basia Galerkina.

His parents owned a house in the town, but the home-craft they made did not bring in enough money, so at the age of 12, Boris started working as a calligrapher in the court.

He had finished school in Polotsk but still needed the exams from an additional year to grant him the right to continue education at a higher level.

Due to the lack of funds, Boris Grigoryevich had to combine studying at the institute with working as a draftsman and giving private lessons.

In 1915, Galerkin published an article in which he put forward an idea of an approximate method for differential equations, in particular boundary value problems.

Sometime before, I.G.Bubnov developed a similar approach for the variational problem solution, which he interpreted as a variant of the Ritz method algorithm.

Belzetskiy, a famous scientist in the field of structural mechanics and theory of elasticity, who was holding a similar chair at the civil engineering faculty, emigrated to Poland.

From 1917 to 1919, Galerkin published a series of works on rectangular and triangular plates curving in scientific periodicals and in the "Russian Academy of Sciences Transactions".

Later he took a break from publications, and only in 1922 he began publishing again, but only in foreign magazines (in the Soviet Union there was not enough paper for scientific literature).

It happened during a very important period of the institute's history, when a group of deans resigned from their posts, protesting from the unceremonious intervention of so-called "student' representatives", controlled by the trade unions and the Communist party committees, into the educational process.

He managed to neutralize overly active "assistants", who were appointed against his will, and he did not hurry to fulfill the orders of incompetent leaders who were conducting infinite experiments at the higher school at that time.

In the spring of 1926, Galerkin learned that Narkompros (Ministry of education) had adopted a decision to close the road-making section at his faculty.

This decision was prepared and adopted secretly by the dean of the Institute Communist party committee in the connection with the company on the elimination of parallel specialties.

He also managed to receive governmental approval for the idea to build some other big laboratories for the faculty (the Hydrotechnical Research Institute was later established on their base).

At one time the academician was even pulled out of a tram by other passengers, and after this "accident", the institute administration applied to the authorities for a car.

Galerkin drew in generals uniform in 1939 when the VITU of Navy (previously known as the Nikolaevsky Engineering Academy, now Military engineering-technical university, Russian: Военный инженерно-технический университет), was a revival on the base of Civil and Industrial Engineering Institute, as the head of its structural mechanics department and the academician became a lieutenant general.

Some academicians and prominent scientists became members (almost everyone was from the Polytechnical Institute), but only Boris Grigoryevich was involved with construction engineering.

[3] Galerkin's name is attached to the finite element method, which is a way to numerically solve partial differential equations.