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): Andrés D'Alessandro • Christopher Brown (museum director) • Georg Kolbe • Guru Nanak • Hugh Thompson Jr. • Kaisa Roose • Kim Il Sung • Kim Min-kyo • Maximilian Kronberger • Miguel Najdorf • Robert W. Gore • Shanti Dope • Steve Williams (rower) • Sudarsan Pattnaik • Suleiman II of the Ottoman Empire • Tony Jones (snooker player)

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