For years, Ritz works were poorly cited in Western Europe and would only become popular after Ritz death in 1909. In Russia, physicists like Ivan Bubnov (in 1913) and Boris Galerkin (in 1915) would rediscover and popularize some of Ritz's methods from 1908. In 1940, Georgii I. Petrov improved these approximations. These methods are now known under different names, including Bubnov–Galerkin, Petrov–Galerkin and Ritz–Galerkin methods.