ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Christian Otto Mohr

Christian Otto Mohr was a really smart guy who lived a long time ago. He was born in Germany in 1835, which is even before your great-great-great-grandparents were born! Mohr was really interested in math and engineering, which means he liked figuring out how things worked and building things.

One day, Mohr noticed that some materials, like metal beams or wooden planks, could bend or stretch really far without breaking. But other materials, like glass or concrete, would break if you bent them or stretched them too much. He wanted to figure out why this was happening.

So, Mohr did a lot of experiments and measurements to study how different materials behaved under stress, which means when you push or pull or twist them. He came up with a really smart way to show this, called Mohr's Circle, which is a special kind of graph that helps engineers understand how much stress a material can take before it breaks.

Thanks to Mohr's work, engineers today have a much better idea of how to design and build safe and strong structures, like bridges and buildings, that can support a lot of weight and stress without breaking. Even though Mohr lived a long time ago, his discoveries are still really important and useful today!