Hermann Grassmann
Hermann Günther Grassmann (, ; 15 April 1809 – 26 September 1877) 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. His work preceded and exceeded the concept which is now known as a
vector space. He introduced the
Grassmannian, the space which parameterizes all
''k''-dimensional linear subspaces of an ''n''-dimensional
vector space ''V''. In linguistics he helped free language history and structure from each other.
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