Hermann Minkowski - Life and Work

Life and Work

Hermann Minkowski was born in Aleksota, a village in the Kingdom of Poland (part of Russian Empire, now Kaunas, Lithuania), to a family of Lithuanian Jews, Rachel (née Taubmann) and Lewin Minkowski, a businessman. Minkowski later converted to Protestantism, in order to pursue his academic career. Hermann was educated in Germany at the Albertina University of Königsberg, where he achieved his doctorate in 1885 under direction of Ferdinand von Lindemann. 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 forms. He also became a friend of another German mathematician, David Hilbert. His brother, Oskar Minkowski (1858–1931), was a well-known physician and researcher.

Minkowski taught at the universities of Bonn, Göttingen, Königsberg and Zürich. 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.

In 1902, he joined the Mathematics Department of Göttingen and became one of the close colleagues of David Hilbert, whom he first met in Königsberg. Constantin Carathéodory was one of his students there.

Minkowski died suddenly of appendicitis in Göttingen in 1909.