Hermann Günther Grassmann (abt. 1809 - 1877)

Born about 15 Apr 1809 in Stettin, Pommern, Preußen

Ancestors

Died 26 Sep 1877 at about age 68 in Stettin, Randow, Pommern, Preußen, Deutsches Reich

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Biography

Hermann Günther Grassmann is Notable.

Hermann was born about 1809. He passed away in 1877. He was a German polymath, known in his day as a linguist and now also as a mathematician. He was also a physicist, general scholar, and publisher. His mathematical work was little noted until he was in his sixties. In his work, Die lineale Ausdehnungslehre, ein neuer Zweig der Mathematik, which must be considered as a masterpiece of originality, he developed the idea of an algebra in which the symbols representing geometric entities such as points, lines and planes, are manipulated using certain rules. He represented subspaces of a space by coordinates leading to point mapping of an algebraic manifold now called the Grassmannian. Grassmann invented what is now called exterior algebra. This was joined to Hamilton's quaternions by Clifford in 1878. Grassmann's mathematical methods were slow to be adopted but eventually they inspired the work of Élie Cartan and have since been used in studying differential forms and their application to analysis and geometry. Other who were directly influenced included Hankel, Peano, Whitehead, and Klein. Much of Peano's contributions were, as he acknowledges himself, based on the ideas of Grassmann. He was an autodidactic polymath. He modified Newton’s theory of colors, he wrote treatises on electrodynamics and the theory of tides, and he was the first to provide a translation of the Rig Veda from Sanskrit into a European language.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Hermann Grassmann
• Wikidata: Item Q77219, en:Wikipedia
• https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Grassmann/
• https://www.maa.org/press/maa-reviews/hermann-gra-mann-biography
• "Deutschland, ausgewählte evangelische Kirchenbücher 1500-1971," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QP22-38QK : 28 March 2020), Hermann Günther Graßmann, 1 May 1809; images digitized and records extracted by Ancestry; citing Baptism, Stettin, Pommern, Preußen, Deutschland, Szczecin, German Lutheran Collection, various parishes, Germany.
• "Deutschland, ausgewählte evangelische Kirchenbücher 1500-1971," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QPK6-DLY5 : 25 March 2020), Hermann Günther Grassmann, 1849; images digitized and records extracted by Ancestry; citing Marriage, Stettin, Pommern, Preußen, Deutschland, Szczecin, German Lutheran Collection, various parishes, Germany.