this is a biography on Andrija Mohorovicic

Andrija Mohorovicic

(1857-1936)

Andrija Mohorovicic was a prominent Croatian scientist in the field of meteorology and seismology at the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth century.

He was born on 23 January 1857 in Volosko near Opatija, where he went to elementary school. He attended secondary school in Rijeka and studied mathematics and physics at the Faculty of Philosophy in Prague in 1875. After graduating, he first taught in grammar school in Zagreb (1879-1880) and then secondary school in Osijek. On 1 November 1882 he began to teach at the Nautical School in Bakar, where he remained for 9 years. In 1891 he was transferred to the secondary school in Zagreb at his own request, and on 1 January 1892 he became the head of the Meteorological Observatory on Gric in Zagreb. In 1893 he became the doctor of philosophy at the Zagreb University. Soon after he was habilitated as private docent, and in 1910 became titular associate university professor. From 1893 to 1917/18 he taught subjects in the fields of geophysics and astronomy at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb. In 1893 he became corresponding member, and in 1898 full member of what was then the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb. At the end of 1921 he retired, and he died in December 1936. He is buried at the Mirogoj Cemetery in Zagreb.

Work in the Nautical School in Bakar was crucial for the beginning of Andrija Mohorovicic's scientific work. This is where he first came into direct contact with meteorology, which he taught at the Nautical School, and which absorbed him to such a degree that he founded a meteorological station in Bakar in 1887.

When he became head of the Meteorological Observatory in Zagreb (1892) he concentrated on three fields. He...