Hermann Minkowski was born in the town of Aleksota, the Suwałki Governorate, the Kingdom of Poland, part of the Russian Empire, Lithuania, to Lewin Boruch Minkowski, a merchant who subsidized the building of the choral synagogue in Kovno, and Rachel Taubmann, both of Jewish descent. Hermann was a younger brother of the medical researcher Oskar. In different sources Minkowski's nationality is variously given as German, Polish, or Lithuanian-German, or Russian. To escape persecution in Russia the family moved to Königsberg in 1872, where the father became involved in rag export and later in manufacture of mechanical clockwork tin toys. Minkowski studied in Königsberg and taught in Bonn, Königsberg and Zurich, and finally in Göttingen from 1902 until his death in 1909. He married Auguste Adler in 1897 with whom he had two daughters; the electrical engineer and inventor Reinhold Rudenberg was his son-in-law. Minkowski died suddenly of appendicitis in Göttingen on 12 January 1909. David Hilbert's obituary of Minkowski illustrates the deep friendship between the two mathematicians : Max Born delivered the obituary on behalf of the mathematics students at Göttingen. The main-belt asteroid12493 Minkowski and M-matrices are named in Minkowski's honor.
Education and career
Minkowski was educated in East Prussia at the AlbertinaUniversity of Königsberg, where he earned his doctorate in 1885 under the direction of Ferdinand von Lindemann. In 1883, while still a student at Königsberg, he was awarded the Mathematics Prize of the French Academy of Sciences for his manuscript on the theory of quadratic forms. He also became a friend of another renowned mathematician, David Hilbert. His brother, Oskar Minkowski, was a well-known physician and researcher. Minkowski taught at the universities of Bonn, Königsberg, Zürich, and Göttingen. At the Eidgenössische Polytechnikum, today the ETH Zurich, he was one of Einstein's teachers. Minkowski explored the arithmetic of quadratic forms, especially concerning n variables, and his research into that topic led him to consider certain geometric properties in a space of n dimensions. In 1896, he presented his geometry of numbers, a geometrical method that solved problems in number theory. He is also the creator of the Minkowski Sausage and the Minkowski cover of a curve. In 1902, he joined the Mathematics Department of Göttingen and became a close colleague of David Hilbert, whom he first met at university in Königsberg. Constantin Carathéodory was one of his students there.
Work on relativity
By 1908 Minkowski realized that the special theory of relativity, introduced by his former student Albert Einstein in 1905 and based on the previous work of Lorentz and Poincaré, could best be understood in a four-dimensional space, since known as the "Minkowski spacetime", in which time and space are not separated entities but intermingled in a four-dimensional space–time, and in which the Lorentz geometry of special relativity can be effectively represented using the invariant interval . The mathematical basis of Minkowski space can also be found in the hyperboloid model of hyperbolic space already known in the 19th century, because isometries in hyperbolic space can be related to Lorentz transformations, which included contributions of Wilhelm Killing, Henri Poincaré, Homersham Cox, Alexander Macfarlane and others. The beginning part of his address called "Space and Time" delivered at the 80th Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicians is now famous:
The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.
