Short answers, pulled from the story.
Friedrich Max Müller (1823-1900) was a German-born British comparative philologist and Orientalist. He was one of the founders of Western academic Indology and religious studies, best known for his Sanskrit scholarship and his direction of the Sacred Books of the East, a fifty-volume set of English translations.
Müller argued that the gods of the Rig-Veda began as words constructed to express abstract ideas about natural forces, but were gradually transformed into imagined personalities. He traced the Indo-European father-god in forms such as Zeus, Jupiter, and Dyaus Pita back to the word Dyaus, meaning shining or radiance, showing how a metaphor becomes personified and fixed as myth.
The Sacred Books of the East was a fifty-volume set of English translations of religious texts that Müller directed. Work on the series continued after his death in 1900.
Müller lost the 1860 election for the Boden Professorship to Monier Monier-Williams despite being considered far better qualified. His Lutheranism, German birth, theological views, and lack of first-hand knowledge of India were held against him by voters. He wrote to his mother that while the professors voted for him almost unanimously, the vulgus profanum made the majority against him.
Müller opposed the racial misuse of the term Aryan. He argued that an ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood, or Aryan eyes and hair is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary. He maintained that the discovery of shared Indo-European ancestry was an argument against racism, not for it.
Swami Vivekananda met Müller and his wife over lunch on the 28th of May 1896. Vivekananda later described Müller as a soul realizing its oneness with the universe and called him a Vedantist of Vedantists who had caught the real soul of the melody of the Vedanta.