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Hermann Minkowski was born in Aleksotas, Russia (now Kaunas, Lithuania), and educated in Germany at the Universities of Berlin and Königsberg, where he achieved his doctorate in 18851885 is a common year starting on Thursday (click on link for calendar) Events January January 4 The first successful appendectomy is performed (Dr. William Grant; patient was Mary Gartside). January 20 L. Thompson patents the roller coaster. January 26 T. While still a student at Königsberg, in 1883 he was awarded the Mathematics Prize of the French Academy of Sciences for his manuscript on the theory of quadratic formIn mathematics, a quadratic form is a homogeneous polynomial of degree two in a number of variables. For example, the distance between two points in three-dimensional Euclidean space is found by taking the square root of a quadratic form involving six vars. Minkowski taught at the universities of Bonn, Göttingen, Königsberg and Zurich. In 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 dimensionAbstract algebra Algebra Linear algebra Dimension (from Latin "measured out") is, in essence, the number of degrees of freedom available for movement in a space. In common usage, the dimensions of an object are the measurements that define its shape and ss. In 1896Events January 4 Utah is admitted as the 45th U. January 5 An Austrian newspaper reports that Wilhelm Rontgen discovered a type of radiation later known as X-rays. January 12 H. Smith takes the first X-ray photograph. January 18 The X-ray machine is exhib, he presented his geometry of numbersGeometry of numbers In number theory, the geometry of numbers refers to a topic and method arising from the work of Hermann Minkowski, on the relationship between convex sets and lattices in n-dimensional space. It has frequently been used in an auxiliary, a geometrical method that solved problems in number theory.

In 1902Events January-April January 28 The Carnegie Institution is founded in Washington, DC with a $10 million gift from Andrew Carnegie. France, Loisy's L'evangile et l'Eglise which inaugurates the Modernist Crisis February 11 Police beat up universal suffrage, he joined the Mathematics Department of Göttingen and became one of the close colleagues of David Hilbert.

By 1907 Minkowski realised that the special theory of relativity, introduced by Einstein in 1905 and based on previous work of Lorentz and Poincaré, could be best understood in a non-Euclidean space, since known as " Minkowski space", in which the 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 nicely represented. This nice representation certainly helped Einstein's quest for general relativity. The beginning part of his address delivered at the 80th Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicians ( September 21, 1908) 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.

The asteroid 12493 Minkowski was named in his honour.