Karl von Terzaghi (born October 2, 1883, Prague, Austria - died October 25, 1963, USA) is an Austrian civil engineer who is considered the father of soil mechanics.
He was born in Prague. He graduated from the Technical University of Graz. As a result of the agreements between the Ottoman Empire and its ally the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the First World War, he became a teacher at the Graduate School of Engineers (today: İTÜ). He established a soil mechanics laboratory for the first time in his studies that he started here, and carried out his studies that allowed him to be accepted as the founder of this field for the first time under the roof of the Graduate School of Engineering.
Terzaghi, who later started to work as a lecturer at Robert College, established a laboratory here and continued his research, and he solved the problem of making clay stronger by examining the interactions of soil and water. In 1924, he collected his work in the book Erdbaumechanik, which is considered the father of modern soil mechanics. As a result of the revolution created by this book, he received a job offer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA and left Robert College to go to the USA.
