A founding member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Timoshenko wrote seminal works in the areas of engineering mechanics, elasticity and strength of materials, many of which are still widely used today.
[15] He studied at a Realschule (Russian: реальное училище) in Romny, Poltava Governorate (now in Sumy Oblast) from 1889 to 1896.
The return to his native Ukraine turned out to be an important part of his career and also influenced his future personal life.
During those years he also pioneered work on buckling, and published the first version of his famous Strength of Materials textbook.
In 1911 he was awarded the D. I. Zhuravski prize of the St. Petersburg State Transport University that helped him survive after losing his job.
In 1918–1920 Timoshenko headed the newly established Institute of Mechanics of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, which today carries his name.
In 1922, Timoshenko moved to the United States where he worked for the Westinghouse Electric Corporation from 1923 to 1927, after which he became a faculty professor in the University of Michigan where he created the first bachelor's and doctoral programs in engineering mechanics.
In addition to his textbooks, in 1963 Timoshenko wrote a book Engineering Education in Russia and an autobiography, As I Remember in the Russian language.
Jacob Pieter Den Hartog, who was Timoshenko's co-worker in the early 1920s at Westinghouse, wrote a review in the magazine Science [20] stating that "between 1922 and 1962 he [S.P.
Timoshenko] wrote a dozen books on all aspects of engineering mechanics, which are in their third or fourth U.S. edition and which have been translated into half a dozen foreign languages each, so that his name as an author and scholar is known to nearly every mechanical and civil engineer in the entire world.. Then, Den Hartog stressed: "There is no question that Timoshenko did much for America.
The celebrated theory that takes into account shear deformation and rotary inertia was developed by Timoshenko in collaboration with Paul Ehrenfest.