Engineer-polymath and scientist who was known for his designs of lightweight towers and roofs, such as Moscow's Shukhov Tower. Paved the way for such structural-engineering breakthroughs as the first hyperboloid structures, diagrid shell structures, tensile structures, gridshell structures, oil reservoirs, pipelines, boilers, ships, and barges.
He graduated from the Imperial Moscow Technical School in 1876. He was taught at Imperial by such notables as Pafnuty Chebyshev, Aleksey Letnikov, and Nikolay Zhukovsky.
He patented the Shukhov cracking process, a thermal cracking process important to the petrochemical industry.
His father, Grigory Ivanovich Shukhov, was a government official who earned some distinction for his Service in the Crimean War.
He and Walter Gropius were contemporaries.
