GRASSMANN, H.G.(1809-1877)

    Grassmann was born in Stettin, Germany,in 1809, and died there in 1877.   SHe was a man of very broad intellectual interests.  He was not only a teacher of mathematics, but of religion, physics, chemistry, German, Latin, history, and geography.  He wrote on physics and composed school texts for the study of German, Latin, and mathematics.  He was a copublisher of a political weekly in the wtormy years of 1848 and 1849.  He was interested in music, and in the 1860s, he was an opera critic for a daily newspaper.

    He prepared a philological treatise on German plants, edited a missionary paper, investigated phonetic laws, wrote a dictionary to the Rig-Veda and translated the Rig-Veda in verse, harmonized folk songs in three voices, composed his great treatise Ausdehnungslehre, and raised nine of his eleven children.     It was in the year 1844 that Grassmann published the first edition of his remarkable Ausdehnungslehre (Calculus of Extension).  Unfortunately, the poor exposition and the obscure presentation caused the work to remain practically unknown to his contemporaries.  A second reformulation, put out in 1862, proved scarcely nore successful.  Discouraged with the reception given his work, Grassmann gave up mathematics for the study of Sanskrit language and literature, a field in which he contributed a number of brilliant papers.
    Grassmann spent his entire life in his native city of Stettin, except for the years from 1834 and 1836, when he taught mathematics in an industrial school in Berlin, having succeeded Jacob Steiner to the post. His teaching was entirely at the secondary level, though he had hoped to secure a university position.  His father was a teacher of mathematics and physics in the gymnasium at Stettin.   His son Hermann Grassmann (born 1859) also became a mathematician.  His father wrote two books on mathematics, and the son wrote a treatise on projective geometry.