Viktor Kyrpychov

He completed his military engineering education with the Cadet Corps in Polotsk (1862) and at the Michaelis Artillery Academy in St.Petersburg (1868), where he subsequently taught. He left military service in 1870 and taught at the St.Petersburg Technological Institute (as professor from 1876 onwards). From 1885 to 1897 he was director of the newly founded Technological Institute in Kharkov and thereafter (until 1902) director of the newly founded Polytechnic Institute in Kiev. Owing to a serious conflict between the students and the administration of the Russian technical universities on the one hand, and the tsarist regime on the other, Kirpichev resigned to take up the post of chairman of the Building Commission of the St.Petersburg Polytechnic Institute in 1903, where he worked until the end of his life as professor of strength of materials and structural mechanics. Timoshenko was especially impressed by his book on the theory of statically indeterminate systems (1903) in which Kirpichev presented the whole theory of such systems in an extremely compact form, but at the same time with great clarity [Timoshenko, 2006, pp. 89–90]. Kirpichev undertook several scientific/technical study tours of Western Europe and the USA where he visited numerous universities and exhibitions.

Main contributions to structural analysis:

Stroitel’naya mekhanika (structural mechanics) [1874]; Lishnie neizvestnye v stroitel’noi mekhanike: Raschet staticheski-neopredelimykh sistem (supernumeration in structural mechanics: the analysis of statically indeterminate systems) [1903]; Sobranie sochinenii (collected works) [1917] 

Source: Kurrer, Karl-Eugen The History of the Theory of Structures, Wilhelm Ernst & Sohn Verlag für Architektur und technische Wissenschaften GmbH, Berlin (Deutschland), ISBN 3-433-01838-3, 2008; p. 741