- Person
- Hermann Minkowski
- Lived
- 1864–1909
- Field
- Mathematics
- From
- German
The story
At the end of the nineteenth century mathematics was organised largely along national lines, through national societies and journals. In the 1890s the German mathematicians Felix Klein and Georg Cantor put forward the idea of an international congress, and an unofficial International Mathematical Congress was held at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. The first official International Congress of Mathematicians followed in Zurich in August 1897.
Hermann Minkowski was by then one of the brightest mathematicians of his generation. Born in 1864 to a Jewish family in Aleksotas, in the Russian Empire, he had grown up in Königsberg, shared the Paris Academy's Grand Prix at 18, and created a new field, the geometry of numbers. In 1896 he was appointed to the Federal Polytechnic in Zurich, where his friend Adolf Hurwitz also taught.
Minkowski joined the congress's organising committee in December 1896. He served on its entertainment committee and on the sub-committee that chose the speakers, where he suggested inviting his friend David Hilbert to speak in case Klein could not attend. The meeting brought together 208 mathematicians from 16 countries, with organisers including Luigi Cremona, Felix Klein, Gösta Mittag-Leffler and Andrey Markov. At the congress itself Minkowski chaired Section I, on arithmetic and algebra.
He stayed involved as the congress became a tradition. He was one of the secretaries of the 1900 congress in Paris, the meeting at which Hilbert presented his famous problems, a theme Minkowski himself had suggested. At Heidelberg in 1904 he spoke in Section I on the geometry of numbers, representing the University of Göttingen, and he represented Göttingen again at Rome in 1908, a few months before his early death in January 1909.
The congress became a lasting institution. Hosted today by the International Mathematical Union, it is the largest mathematics conference in the world and meets every four years. Its opening ceremony is where the Fields Medal, first awarded at Oslo in 1936, is presented, along with the Abacus Medal, the Gauss Prize and the Chern Medal. An invitation to speak there is regarded as one of the highest marks of recognition a mathematician can receive.
Why it matters
Minkowski helped build the international community of mathematicians that still meets, collaborates and honours its best work today.
About Hermann Minkowski
Mathematician who taught the young Einstein and in 1908 fused space and time into a single four-dimensional “spacetime”, the geometry on which relativity still rests.
More about Hermann Minkowski
- Minkowski rewrote electrodynamics in four dimensionsAt Göttingen Hermann Minkowski worked out a four-dimensional treatment of electrodynamics, recasting the laws of electricity and magnetism for moving bodies.
- Minkowski invented the geometry of numbersHermann Minkowski created the 'geometry of numbers', solving problems about whole numbers by picturing them as points in a grid, published from 1896.
- Hermann Minkowski joined space and time into spacetimeIn a 1908 lecture Hermann Minkowski, once Einstein's teacher, showed that relativity is best understood in a single four-dimensional 'spacetime', the language of modern physics.
- Minkowski suggested Hilbert's famous list of problemsIn a January 1900 letter, Hermann Minkowski urged David Hilbert to sketch the problems future mathematicians should tackle, inspiring Hilbert's celebrated 23 problems.
- Minkowski's maths guides robots and machine toolsThe Minkowski sum, a way of adding shapes named after Hermann Minkowski, is used in robot motion planning, collision detection and machining.
Sources
- Hermann Minkowski MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews
- International Congress of Mathematicians Wikipedia
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