Hermann Minkowski (June 22, 1864 – January 12, 1909) was a German mathematician of Polish Jewish descent, who created and developed the geometry of numbers and who used geometrical methods to solve difficult problems in number theory, mathematical physics, and the theory of relativity.
Hermann Minkowski was born in Aleksotas, a suburb of Kaunas, Lithuania, which was then part of the Russian Empire, to a family of Lithuanian Jewish and Polish Jewi...
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Hermann Minkowski (June 22, 1864 – January 12, 1909) was a German mathematician of Polish Jewish descent, who created and developed the geometry of numbers and who used geometrical methods to solve difficult problems in number theory, mathematical physics, and the theory of relativity.
Hermann Minkowski was born in Aleksotas, a suburb of Kaunas, Lithuania, which was then part of the Russian Empire, to a family of Lithuanian Jewish and Polish Jewish descent. He 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.
Minkowski taught at the universities of Bonn, Göttingen, Königsberg and Zürich. At the Eidgenössische Polytechnikum, today the ETH Zurich, he...
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