If you've never heard Grassmann's story it's worth reading. He barely received any recognition during his life and his work was revived years later as an almost completely independent branch of math behind many modern theories.
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.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Grassmann
He was intensely interested in linguistics and tracing the origins of language, especially trying to prove the Gothic language was older or independent of Sanskrit and Proto-Indo-European.
He made several important linguistic discoveries,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grassmann%27s_law
The fact that deaspiration in Greek took place after the change of Proto-Indo-European *bʰ, *dʰ, *gʰ to /pʰ, tʰ, kʰ/, and the fact that no other Indo-European languages show Grassmann's law, suggests that Grassmann's law developed separately in Greek and Sanskrit (although quite possibly due to areal influence from one language to the other), i.e. that it was not inherited from PIEAs an aside:
(The modern understanding of the Dravidian language stands out as a failure of the proto-Indo-European model as a central origin in some views as it is so distinctly different as to lack common features.)
The Dravidian languages have not been shown to be related to any other language family.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dravidian_languages#Relationship_to_other_language_familiesPerhaps some of his interest can be explained by the relationship between Sanskrit and machine language with respect to grammar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backus%E2%80%93Naur_Form
The name Pāṇini Backus form has also been suggested in view of the facts that the expansion Backus Normal Form may not be accurate, and that Pāṇini had independently discovered a similar notation earlier. [7]http://www.infinityfoundation.com/mandala/t_es/t_es_rao-t_syntax.htm
Dr. Alexander Wilhelmy has called to my attention a work by Panini. , Panini was a scholar who flourished between 400 B.C. and 200 B.C.; perhaps his most significant work was the compilation of a grammar of Sanskrit. In order to describe the (rather complicated) rules of grammar, he invented a notation which is equivalent in its power to that of Backus, and has many similar properties: given the use to which the notation was put, it is possible to identify structures equivalent to the Backus "|" and to the use of the meta-brackets "<" and ">" enclosing suggestive names. Panini avoided the necessity for the character "::=" by writing the meta-result on the right rather than the left [see, or Ingerman (1996) for a similar notation].
Grassmann was clearly able to see the connection between math and linguistics and was intensely active in both fields. Is it so strange then that we should see a resurgence in recent research finding connections between the two fields, (in Lagrangian dynamics, random matrices, prime numbers and the Riemann hypothesis, and more between linguistics and math and physics and even game theory.)
Related: http://arxivindex.blogspot.com/2012/04/more-linguistics-and-qft.html
http://arxivindex.blogspot.com/2012/04/random-matrices.html
