biography
| name: |
Grassmann, Hermann (Günther)
|
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1809–77)
|
| biography:
| Mathematician and philologist, born in Szczecin, Poland (formerly Stettin, Germany). He studied at Berlin, and spent most of his life as a teacher there and in Stettin. His book Die lineale Ausdehnungslehre (1844, The Theory of Linear Extension) developed a general calculus for vectors. It made little impact during his life, and it is only since his death that its importance has gradually been recognized; it anticipated much later work in quaternions, vectors, tensors, matrices, and differential forms. From 1849 he studied Sanskrit and other ancient Indo-European languages and, unlike his mathematics, his work in Indo-European and Germanic philology met with immediate acceptance. |
|
|
