He was born on 8 October 1835 to a landowning family in
Wesselburen in the
Holstein region. At the age of 16 attended the
Polytechnic School in
Hannover. Starting in 1855, his early working life was spent in
railroad engineering for the
Hanover and
Oldenburg state railways, designing some famous
bridges and making some of the earliest uses of
steel trusses. Even during his early railway years, Mohr had developed an interest in the theories of mechanics and the
strength of materials. In 1867, he became
professor of mechanics at
Stuttgart Polytechnic, and in 1873 at
Dresden Polytechnic. Mohr had a direct and unpretentious lecturing style that was popular with his students. In addition to a lone textbook, Mohr published many research papers on the theory of structures and strength of materials. In 1874, Mohr formalised the idea of a
statically indeterminate structure. Mohr was an enthusiast for graphical tools and developed the method, for visually representing
stress in three dimensions, previously proposed by
Carl Culmann. In 1882, he famously developed the graphical method for analysing stress known as
Mohr's circle and used it to propose an early theory of strength based on
shear stress. He also developed the
Williot-Mohr diagram for truss displacements and the
Maxwell-Mohr method for analysing
statically indeterminate structures, it can also be used to determine the displacement of truss nodes and forces acting on each member. The Maxwell-Mohr method is also referred to as the virtual force method for redundant trusses. He retired in 1900, yet continued his scientific work in Dresden until his death on 2 October 1918. ==See also==