Hermann Minkowski (22.06.1864-12.01.1909) was a German mathematician and physicist. He was born in the village of Aleksoty (in the former Minsk Governorate). He graduated from the University of Königsberg (1885). In 1887-94 he worked at the University of Bonn (a professor from 1892), in 1894 —96 at Königsberg, in 1896 —1902 at the Polytechnic in Zurich, and from 1902 he was a professor at the University of Göttingen.
In 1908 he put forward the idea of uniting the three dimensions of space and time into a single four-dimensional space in which pseudo-Euclidean geometry holds. In Minkowski's four-dimensional space, which he called the four-dimensional world, its elements are events occurring at a definite point of space at a definite moment. Thus Minkowski gave the notion of a four-dimensional world whose elements (“events”) have physical reality independently of the frame of reference. He also postulated that all physical laws must be invariant under the group of Lorentz transformations.
In the paper “The Fundamental Theories of Electromagnetic Processes in Moving Bodies” (1908) he derived the equation of the electromagnetic field in any moving matter and developed the whole arsenal of concepts of relativistic physics (proper time, rest mass and others). He showed that the theory of relativity can be regarded as the geometry of “space-time”.