Vilen Mitrofanovich Strutinsky's impact on nuclear and many particle physics

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.