No label defined (Q4335839)

Grassmann's algebra is not easy to find, lying concealed in a geometrical content. He aims for a uniform formal construction of mathematics, with connections/rules leading to the closure of his algebraic system. Simple connections are associative and commutative, single-valued, as in subtraction. The combination of connections was to be distributive over multiplication. In the first version, Grassmann did not define a new set of magnitudes with one or more connections, but kept to the known reals. Later versions contained such things, the Grassmann algebras of Clifford. These arose out of his search for a uniform formal construction, here an abstract foundation for the hypercomplex number systems arising out of the multiplication extending the basic vectors, a development handicapped by being first and ahead of his time. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0853.00027].