There have been few outstanding universal scientists in the entire history of the world, but in this series, there will undoubtedly be a place for the hero of this issue. Chemist, physicist, economist, technologist, geologist, metrologist, aeronaut, shipbuilder, compiler and editor of encyclopedias, sociologist - all this refers to one scientist: Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev (1834-1907). In a short review it is almost impossible to list all the achievements of Dmitry Ivanovich on scientific, government and public fields. “In total, more than four subjects made up my name: the periodic law, the study of the elasticity of gases, the understanding of solutions as associations and the “Fundamentals of Chemistry,” Mendeleev noted on July 10, 1905 in his personal diary. The textbook “Fundamentals of Chemistry” written by Mendeleev was the main book of Russian chemistry students for half a century and went through eight editions during Mendeleev’s lifetime. “The Fundamentals...” was quite organically accompanied by the Table known to everyone. Mendeleev's discovery of the periodic law in 1869 is the highest achievement of the natural sciences of the second half of the 19th century. Penetration into this secret of nature allowed Dmitry Ivanovich to confidently predict the discovery of new chemical elements, the ranks of which are regularly replenished to this day. The element, discovered in 1958, was named mendelevium. Modern gas dynamics are based on experimental studies of the compressibility of gases carried out by Mendeleev, which made it possible to obtain the equation of gas state. Nowadays it is known as the Mendeleev-Clapeyron equation. In the 1870s, the scientist devoted a lot of time to studying the properties of oil, being one of the first to propose the fractional principle of its distillation. Ministers of the tsarist government often used Mendeleev’s valuable advice. S.Yu. Witte wrote in his memoirs: “The question of the importance of industry in Russia has not yet been assessed and understood. Only our great scientist Mendeleev... understood this question and tried to enlighten the Russian public.” Mendeleev proposed using domestic investments on a larger scale, more actively attracting foreign capital, and optimizing customs policy, implementing “rational protectionism.” A special place in the scientist’s life was occupied by his active participation in the struggle to improve the social structure of mankind. A convinced evolutionist and progressist, D.I. Mendeleev, believed that: “Idealists and materialists see the possibility of change only in revolutions, and realism recognizes that real changes occur only gradually, in an evolutionary way... But so that the upcoming path should be as evolutionary and progressive as possible , first of all, he should not deny the past.”