Герман Грассман: Математик, тілші және ғалымның өмірі мен еңбектері

German polymath, linguist and mathematician (1809–1877)

Hermann Günther Grassmann (link=no, ; 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.

Hermann Grassmann was the third of 12 children of Justus Günter Grassmann, an ordained minister who taught mathematics and physics at the Stettin Gymnasium, where Hermann was educated. Grassmann was an undistinguished student until he obtained a high mark on the examinations for admission to Prussian universities. Beginning in 1827, he studied theology at the University of Berlin, also taking classes in classical languages, philosophy, and literature. He does not appear to have taken courses in mathematics or physics. Although lacking university training in mathematics, it was the field that most interested him when he returned to Stettin in 1830 after completing his studies in Berlin. After a year of preparation, he sat the examinations needed to teach mathematics in a gymnasium, but achieved a result good enough to allow him to teach only at the lower levels. Around this time, he made his first significant mathematical discoveries, ones that led him to the important ideas he set out in his 1844 paper Die lineale Ausdehnungslehre, ein neuer Zweig der Mathematik, here referred to as A1, later revised in 1862 as Die Ausdehnungslehre: Vollständig und in strenger Form bearbeitet, here referred to as A2. In 1834 Grassmann began teaching mathematics at the Gewerbeschule in Berlin. A year later, he returned to Stettin to teach mathematics, physics, German, Latin, and religious studies at a new school, the Otto Schule. Over the next four years, Grassmann passed examinations enabling him to teach mathematics, physics, chemistry, and mineralogy at all secondary school levels. In 1847, he was made an "Oberlehrer" or head teacher. In 1852, he was appointed to his late father's position at the Stettin Gymnasium, thereby acquiring the title of Professor. In 1847, he asked the Prussian Ministry of Education to be considered for a university position, whereupon that Ministry asked Ernst Kummer for his opinion of Grassmann. Kummer wrote back saying that Grassmann's 1846 prize essay (see below) contained "commendably good material expressed in a deficient form." Kummer's report ended any chance that Grassmann might obtain a university post. This episode proved the norm; time and again, leading figures of Grassmann's day failed to recognize the value of his mathematics. Starting during the political turmoil in Germany, 1848–49, Hermann and his brother Robert published a Stettin newspaper, Deutsche Wochenschrift für Staat, Kirche und Volksleben, calling for German unification under a constitutional monarchy. (This eventuated in 1871.) After writing a series of articles on constitutional law, Hermann parted company with the newspaper, finding himself increasingly at odds with its political direction. Grassmann had eleven children, seven of whom reached adulthood. A son, Hermann Ernst Grassmann, became a professor of mathematics at the University of Giessen.

In the 1840s, mathematicians were generally unprepared to understand Grassmann's ideas. In the 1860s and 1870s various mathematicians came to ideas similar to that of Grassmann's, but Grassmann himself was not interested in mathematics anymore. Adhémar Jean Claude Barré de Saint Venant developed a vector calculus similar to that of Grassmann, which he published in 1845. He then entered into a dispute with Grassmann about which of the two had thought of the ideas first. Grassmann had published his results in 1844, but Saint Venant claimed that he had first developed these ideas in 1832. One of the first mathematicians to appreciate Grassmann's ideas during his lifetime was Hermann Hankel, whose 1867 Theorie der complexen Zahlensysteme. [ ], he developed [ ] some of Hermann Grassmann's algebras and W. R. Hamilton's quaternions. Hankel was the first to recognise the significance of Grassmann's long neglected writings and was strongly influenced by them. In 1872 Victor Schlegel published the first part of his System der Raumlehre, which used Grassmann's approach to derive ancient and modern results in plane geometry. Felix Klein wrote a negative review of Schlegel's book citing its incompleteness and lack of perspective on Grassmann. Schlegel followed in 1875 with a second part of his System according to Grassmann, this time developing higher dimensional geometry. Meanwhile, Klein was advancing his Erlangen program, which also expanded the scope of geometry. Comprehension of Grassmann awaited the concept of vector spaces, which then could express the multilinear algebra of his extension theory. To establish the priority of Grassmann over Hamilton, Josiah Willard Gibbs urged Grassmann's heirs to have the 1840 essay on tides published. A. N. Whitehead's first monograph, the Universal Algebra (1898), included the first systematic exposition in English of the theory of extension and the exterior algebra. With the rise of differential geometry the exterior algebra was applied to differential forms. In 1995 Lloyd C. Kannenberg published an English translation of The Ausdehnungslehre and Other works. For an introduction to the role of Grassmann's work in contemporary mathematical physics see The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose.

Grassmann's mathematical ideas began to spread only towards the end of his life. Thirty years after the publication of A1 the publisher wrote to Grassmann: “Your book Die Ausdehnungslehre has been out of print for some time. Since your work hardly sold at all, roughly 600 copies were used in 1864 as waste paper and the remaining few odd copies have now been sold out, with the exception of the one copy in our library.” Disappointed by the reception of his work in mathematical circles, Grassmann lost his contacts with mathematicians as well as his interest in geometry. In the last years of his life he turned to historical linguistics and the study of Sanskrit. He wrote books on German grammar, collected folk songs, and learned Sanskrit. He wrote a 2,000 page dictionary and a translation of the Rigveda (more than 1,000 pages). In modern studies of the Rigveda, Grassmann's work is often cited. In 1955 a third edition of his dictionary was issued. Grassmann also noticed and presented a phonological rule that exists in both Sanskrit and Greek. In his honor, this phonological rule is known as Grassmann's law. His discovery was revolutionary for historical linguistics at the time, as it challenged the widespread notion of Sanskrit as an older predecessor to other Indo European languages. This was a widespread assumption due to Sanskrit's more agglutinative structure, which languages like Latin and Greek were thought to have passed through to reach their more "modern" synthetic structure. However, Grassman's work proved that, in at least one phonological pattern, German was indeed "older" (i. e., less synthetic) than Sanskrit. This meant that genealogical and typological classifications of languages were at last correctly separated in linguistics, allowing significant progress for later linguists. These philological accomplishments were honored during his lifetime. He was elected to the American Oriental Society and in 1876 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Tübingen.