Georg Mohr

Jørgen Mohr ( Latinised Georg (ius ) Mohr ) ( born April 1, 1640 Copenhagen, † January 26, 1697 in Kieslingswalde, today Sławnikowice ) was a Danish mathematician. He toured the Netherlands, France and England.

Mohr was born in Copenhagen, the son of the Hospital Inspector and businessman David Mohrendal. His contribution to geometry consisted in proving that any geometric construction that can be done with ruler and compass, even with the compass alone is possible ( set of Mohr- Mascheroni ). He published this proof in the book Euclides danicus, Amsterdam 1672, which he dedicated to the King of Denmark in anticipation of a financial supply. The king wanted to appoint him inspector of the royal shipyard; Mohr was but too much of commitment, because he wanted to live as a freelance scholar and leaned about from.

Although this book was included in the mathematical bibliographies, no one bothered to check it, and so it remained unnoticed for 250 years. Mohr's results were instead the Italian Lorenzo Mascheroni attributed to the hundred years later the evidence provided independently by Mohr (1797 ). After one of his students found the book in a Copenhagen Antiquarian, the mathematics professor Johannes Hjelmslev Mohr in 1928 helped the recognition of merit and carried out the work as a facsimile in the same year re-issued.

Mohr published his Euclides danicus simultaneously in Danish and Dutch ( each with a long subtitle in the appropriate language ) rather than, as would be expected at that time, in Latin. Latin it would have been a larger circle of readers.

1675 he sent by Henry Oldenburg, a book about the drawing of roots to Leibniz, who in a letter to Oldenburg very highly expressed in the following year also. Mohr's son ( born 1692 ) claimed that his father had written three important books on mathematics and philosophy, the third is the opposite exercise on a mathematical Tractätlein Compendium Euclidis Curiosi. Mohr's authorship on the counter exercise is, however, disputed.

Mohr was a friend of Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus and spent his last years as his guest in Kieslingswalde in Görlitz, where Tschirnhaus wanted to build the nucleus of a Saxon Academy of Sciences.

The Danish mathematician competition is named after Georg Mohr.