October 17 was 162 years since the birth of July Mikhailovich Shokalsky (1856 – 1940) was an outstanding geographer, meteorologist, hydrologist and cartographer, founder of the national Oceanography, honorary member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1939), Lieutenant General (1912), Hero of Labor (1923), corresponding member of two dozen foreign scientific societies and academies of sciences, "one of the three most outstanding leaders of the Russian Geographical Society for the first century of its existence" (as Veniamin Petrovich Semyonov-Tyan-Shansky used to call him).
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Yuly Shokalsky taught all his life: at the Maritime school, the Maritime Academy and Leningrad State University. He headed the library of the Ministry of the Sea, headed the hydrometeorological part of the Main Hydrographic Department. He explored Lake Ladoga, the rivers Vychegda and Tavda, the Caspian Sea; led an Oceanographic expedition to study the Black Sea. He managed a few projects on hypsometric topics and compilation of topographic maps of Russia, edited several atlases. He is the author of more than 1 300 scientific works