Ernst Max Mohr

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Ernst Max Mohr (born April 20, 1910 in Ebersbach an der Fils , Württemberg; † May 16, 1989 in Berlin ) was a German mathematician.

Life

Ernst Mohr went to school in Göttingen, he studied mathematics and physics at the universities in Tübingen and Munich. In Munich, Carathéodory , Oskar Perron and Heinrich Tietze were among his teachers. In Göttingen, he completed his studies with a doctoral thesis on the representation of complex groups and the characteristics of the irreducible among them with Hermann Weyl . After completing his dissertation, Mohr first tried to get an assistant position in Göttingen from mid-1933, but then moved to the Technical University of Breslau on November 1, 1934 .

In Breslau he worked under Johann Nikuradse in the field of hydrodynamics , applied mathematics and differential equations, but also published on polynomials. From 1939 he was a lecturer in mechanics and applied mathematics at the University of Breslau, where he also received his habilitation. In 1940 he published a work on the forces and moments that transfer singularities to a stationary fluid flow , which deals with the problem of determining the forces that the constant flow of an ideal, incompressible fluid exerts on hard bodies in its course. The next year he published remarks on Mises' treatment of the Buffon needle problem and On Navier-Stokes's stress approach for viscous fluid flows .

In 1942 Mohr was appointed to the Charles University in Prague , where he received an extraordinary professorship the following year. Together with Johann Nikuradse he published the work on the theory of the supporting wing .

In Prague he also met Hubert Cremer and Georg Feigl . On 12 May 1944 he was illegally because of the accusation of his wife a friend Feindsender BBC to have heard, along with his wife in Prague Hotel Beranek by the Gestapo arrested. On October 24, 1944, his case was heard in the People's Court , charged with wiretapping enemy broadcasters, denigrating Hitler and defeatism. He is said to have described the war as already lost, the extermination of the Jews as a mistake and the representation of Stalin in the German press as wrong. He also saw parallels between the dictatorship under Bolshevism and National Socialism. Anyone who was a soldier at the front - in this case the informant's husband - was "just another idiot". Mohr admitted eavesdropping on enemy transmitters, but presented his work as important for the conduct of the war - especially for the Air Force. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. On the basis of the submissions from Nikuradse and Hans Rohrbach , who also judged his work to be important for the conduct of the war, his death sentence was suspended for six months, he was transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp , and later on December 18, 1944 to the Plötzensee prison for there perform mathematical calculations for the V weapon programs. There he witnessed executions. A few days before the deadline for suspension of the death penalty expired, he was freed by the advancing Red Army .

On January 1, 1946, he took over the chair for pure and applied mathematics at the Technical University of Berlin . Due to the events in 1944 and 1945, Mohr's next publications did not appear until 1951. One of the five publications that appeared in that year deals with the numerical solution of differential equations. However, the realization that he was persecuted by the National Socialist government took hold only slowly, and with a lot of luck, the death sentence that had been imposed on him was overturned in 1958. and he did not receive financial compensation until 1963.

Mohr remained director of the Mathematical Institute at the TU Berlin until his retirement in 1978, and works by him continued to appear after that, for example in 1982 a contribution to Weyl's theory of the limit point case . In addition, he also investigated the Sturm-Liouville problem .

Ernst Max Mohr died in Berlin in 1989 at the age of 79. His grave is in the forest cemetery in Zehlendorf . A boulder serving as a tombstone only bears the inscription "Familie Mohr".

Works (selection)

  • The presentation of the complex groups and the characteristics of the irreducible ones among them , 1933
  • About the forces and moments which singularities transfer to a stationary fluid flow , 1940
  • Notes on Mises' Treatment of the Needle Problem by Buffon , 1941
  • About the Navier-Stokes stress approach for viscous fluid flows , 1941
  • On the theory of the supporting wing , 1942
  • A contribution to Weyl's theory of the limit point case , 1982

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ M. Georgiadou, Constantin Carathéodory: Mathematics and Politics in Turbulent Times , Berlin-Heidelberg, New York, 2004
  2. ↑ Freddy Litten in the yearbook of the German Mathematicians Association 98 (4), 1996, pp. 192–212
  3. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende: Lexicon of Berlin burial places . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 , p. 637.
personal data
SURNAME Mohr, Ernst Max
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH April 20, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Ebersbach an der Fils , Württemberg
DATE OF DEATH May 16, 1989
Place of death Berlin