scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1006229

History of mathematics in the 19th century (01A55) Biographies, obituaries, personalia, bibliographies (01A70) Other geometric groups, including crystallographic groups (20H15)

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Where did Hermann Graßmann get his ideas from? Look here and at the article by \textit{M.-L. Heuser} [|ibid., 47-58 (1996; Zbl 0907.01014)]. Justus, his father, wrote on crystallography in 1839, and Hermann briefly applied the linear algebra of the Ausdehnungslehre to crystallography in 1844. What ideas were common to the two? Justus used the ideas of the crystallographer Weiss in Berlin, based on forces and symmetry, giving seven systems of boundary planes. A distinction was made between actual faces and essential or possible faces, and an insistence on the equivalence of exterior shape and interior forces. Two rules were that two plane forming faces could be summed to another plane forming face; and that a set of elementary forces could be combined to give all interior forces under integer coefficients. Justus used a symbolism, line segments combined under integers to a (in modern terms) three-dimensional free \(Z\)-module (with the coefficients represented as exponents, the symmetries of the crystal mirrored in the rules for the exponents and their permutations including negatives and changes of sign: see also Heuser pp. 49-54). Here is material for Hermann to work with. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0853.00027].

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