"I define as a unit any magnitude that can serve for the numerical derivation of a series of magnitudes, and in particular I call such a unit an original unit if it is not derivable from another unit. The unit of numbers, that is one, I call the absolute unit, all others relative. Zero can never be a unit."
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 li
"Geometry can in no way be viewed... as a branch of mathematics; instead, geometry relates to something already given in nature, namely, space. I... realized that there must be a branch of mathematics which yields in a purely abstract way laws similar to geometry."
"A work on tidal theory... led me to Lagranges Mécanique analytique and thereby I returned to those ideas of analysis. All the developments in that work were transformed through the principles of the new analysis in such a simple way that the calculations often came out more than ten times shorter than in Lagranges work."
"The concept of centroid as sum led me to examine Möbius Barycentrische Calcul, a work of which until then I knew only the title; and I was not little pleased to find here the same concept of the summation of points to which I had been led in the course of the development. This was the first, and... the only point of contact which my new system of analysis had with the one that was already known."
"I feel entitled to hope that I have found in this new analysis the only natural method according to which mathematics should be applied to nature, and according to which geometry may also be treated, whenever it leads to general and to fruitful results."
"Some of the groundbreaking work in the treatment of n-dimensional geometry—was carried out by Hermann Günther Grassmann. ...Grassmann was responsible for the creation of an abstract science of "spaces," inside which the usual geometry was only a special case. Grassmann published his pioneering ideas (originating a branch of mathematics known as linear algebra) in 1844, in a book commonly known as Ausdehnungslehre... Grassmanns suggestion that BA = -AB violates one of the sacrosanct laws of arithmetic... Grassmann faced up squarely to this disturbing possibility and invented a new consistent algebra (known as exterior algebra) that allowed for several processes of multiplication and at the same time could handle geometry in any number of dimensions."
"It is clear... that the concept of space can in no wise be generated by thought. ...Whoever maintains the contrary must undertake to derive the dimensions of space from the pure laws of thought—a problem which is at once seen to be impossible of solution."