Hermann Grassmann

Hermann Grassmann was a German polymath, born in Stettin in 1809, who was known in his lifetime as a linguist and is now equally remembered as a mathematician. Educated as a theologian and largely self-taught in mathematics, he taught in secondary schools. His 1844 work on linear extension set out ideas that anticipated and went beyond the modern vector space, including the Grassmannian, the space of all linear subspaces of a given dimension. It was little noticed until he was in his sixties. In linguistics he formulated Grassmann's law and edited a dictionary of the Rigveda.