Hermann Grassmann

Hermann Günther Grassmann 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.

15 April 1809

Born on the same birth day (15 April): Abigail Mejia • Arshile Gorky • Artur Alliksaar • Bliss Carman • Christopher Brown (museum director) • Claudia Cardinale • Darren Nicholls • Desiré Ecaré • Elizabeth Catlett • Elizabeth Montgomery • Felix Pipes • Johannes Stark • John Williams (actor) • Josiane Balasko • Nikolaas Tinbergen • William Forgan Smith

Born in the same month (April 1809): Karl Felix Halm