  This paper is dedicated to the memory of Vilen Mitrofanovich Strutinsky who
would have been 80 this year. His achievements in theoretical nuclear physics
are briefly summarized. I discuss in more detail the most successful and
far-reaching of them, namely (1) the shell-correction method and (2) the
extension of Gutzwiller's semiclassical theory of shell structure and its
application to finite fermionic systems, and mention some applications in other
domains of physics.
