Hermann Minkowski

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Hermann Minkowski

Hermann Minkowski (born June 22, 1864 in Aleksotas , Russian Empire , today Kaunas , Lithuania , † January 12, 1909 in Göttingen ) was a German mathematician and physicist .

life and work

Minkowski was the second son of a Jewish merchant family in 1872 because of anti-Semitic measures in Tsarist Russia into from the Russian Empire Prussian Konigsberg emigrated. His father was the businessman Lewin Minkowski (around 1825 to 1884), his mother Rachel Taubmann (around 1827 to 1904). His older brother was the physician Oskar Minkowski , the astrophysicist Rudolph Minkowski is his nephew. Another brother Max Minkowski (1844 to around 1924) was a successful grain merchant, French consul in Königsberg and founder of the new building for the art museum in Königsberg. The great-grandfather on his father's side was called Isaac ben Aaron (1788-1852), came from Karlin near Pinsk in what is now Belarus and took the name Minkowski under Tsar Nicholas I.

Minkowski attended the old town high school in Königsberg from 1872 . As a high school student he read Gauss , Dirichlet and Dedekind and attracted the attention of Professor Heinrich Weber from Königsberg . In 1880 he received his school leaving certificate at the age of fifteen. He then studied from 1880 for five semesters at the University of Königsberg , primarily with Heinrich Weber and Woldemar Voigt . Minkowski studied another three semesters in Berlin, where he attended lectures by Ernst Eduard Kummer , Leopold Kronecker , Karl Weierstrass , Hermann von Helmholtz and Gustav Robert Kirchhoff . On July 30, 1885 Minkowski received his doctorate from the philosophical faculty in Königsberg with the thesis "Investigations into square forms - determination of the number of different forms which a given genus contains". His doctoral supervisor was Ferdinand von Lindemann .

As a student, he took part in the Paris Academy competition in 1881 (it was about the proof of a formula by Eisenstein about the number of representations of a number by five squares) and received the award in 1883 (with special praise from Hermite ) together with Henry Smith . The latter had already given a proof in 1867, but due to the relative isolation of English mathematics at the end of the 19th century, this had escaped the mathematicians on the continent. Minkowski's dissertation continued his award work.

In Königsberg, Minkowski made friends with the lecturer Adolf Hurwitz and with David Hilbert , then a fellow student. The friendship with Hilbert lasted a lifetime and later led to a close collaboration in Göttingen. From 1887 Minkowski taught at the University of Bonn , where he became assistant professor in 1892, in Königsberg in 1894 and from 1896 at the Polytechnic in Zurich , where he was the colleague of his friend Hurwitz and Albert Einstein was one of his students. In 1897 he married the daughter of a Strasbourg leather manufacturer Auguste Adler (1875–1944) in Strasbourg, with whom he had two daughters. The daughter Lily (1898–1983) later married the electrical engineer Reinhold Rüdenberg and Ruth (1902–1983) the radiologist Franz Buschke . Both emigrated to the USA, where their husbands were professors.

From 1890 he expanded his geometry of numbers, which he had started in his price work and where he did pioneering work. His main work Geometry of Numbers above appeared in 1896 and in full in 1910. He developed and used methods of the theory of convex bodies and lattices and applied them to number theory. Minkowski's grid point theorem played a central role , with which he proved important theorems of algebraic number theory such as Dirichlet's unit theorem or the finiteness of class numbers. In 1907 his second major number-theoretical work, Diophantine Approximations , appeared, in which he gave applications of his geometry of numbers. Around 1895, David Hilbert and Minkowski were asked by the German Mathematicians Association (DMV) to write reports on number theory as part of a series of review articles for the DMV's annual report, with Minkowski writing the part on elementary number theory (quadratic forms, continued fractions, geometry of the Numbers) should take over. Only Hilbert's payment report was then published .

In 1902 he took over a chair in Göttingen, which he held until his death. In Göttingen he began to be interested in mathematical physics and dealt with the then current theory of (newly discovered) electrons and with problems of electrodynamics .

Around 1907, Minkowski recognized that the work of Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (1904) and Albert Einstein (1905) on the theory of relativity can be understood in a non-Euclidean space . He suspected that space and time are connected in a four-dimensional space-time continuum and wrote treatises on four-dimensional electrodynamics. In 1908 Minkowski gave the sensational lecture Raum und Zeit at the meeting of the Society of German Natural Scientists and Doctors . Einstein, who initially opposed Minkowski's four-dimensional approach, used his ideas on the space-time continuum, later in his general theory of relativity . The first to recognize the connection between the Lorentz transformation and a four-dimensional space with the time coordinate ict - i.e. with the speed of light as a constant - was Henri Poincaré in 1905 . Poincaré succeeded in the basic formulation of four-vectors , but he did not pursue this line of thought later. (See → History of the Special Theory of Relativity )

The Minkowski space , the Minkowski diagram and the Minkowski inequality are named after him, as is the asteroid (12493) Minkowski , a lunar crater , the M-matrices and the Minkowskiweg in Göttingen. A memorial plaque is attached to his long-term home in Göttingen (1902–1909) in today's Planckstrasse 15.

Death and grave

At the age of 44, Minkowski suffered a ruptured appendix . At that time, surgical interventions to cure the disease were not yet common, but even an operation could not save his life. In the last few hours he was still trying to complete numerous manuscripts.

Grave of Hermann and Oskar Minkowski in the Heerstrasse cemetery in Berlin-Westend , here still marked with the grave of honor (2008)

Hilbert's obituary expresses the close friendship that bound the two mathematicians:

Since my student days, Minkowski was my best and most reliable friend, who clung to me with all his own depth and loyalty. Our science, which we loved most, had brought us together; it appeared to us like a blooming garden. We also liked to look for hidden paths there and discovered some new, beautiful prospects, and when one showed them to the other and we admired them together, our joy was complete. It was a godsend to me that is rarely given, and I must be grateful that I have owned it for so long. Suddenly death tore him from our side. But what death cannot take away from us is its noble image in our heart and the awareness that its spirit continues to work in us.

Hermann Minkowski's urn was initially buried in Göttingen. After the death of their brother Oskar in 1932, however, they were reburied in a shared grave at the interdenominational cemetery Heerstraße in the Berlin district of Charlottenburg in what is now Westend (grave location: 3-A-30).

By resolution of the Berlin Senate , the final resting place of the Minkowski brothers was dedicated in 1994 for the usual twenty-year period as an honorary grave for the State of Berlin .

Although the Governing Mayor Klaus Wowereit had a wreath laid on Hermann Minkowski's grave for the 150th birthday of Hermann Minkowski in June 2014, the Senate he led decided against an extension of the honorary grave dedication that same year. This decision put the continued preservation of the Minkowski brothers' burial site into question.

Publications

  • H. Minkowski: Selected works on number theory and geometry. With D. Hilbert's memorial speech to H. Minkowski, Göttingen 1909. (Teubner-Archiv zur Mathematik, Volume 12) Ekkehard Krätzel , Bernulf Weissbach (Ed.), Leipzig 1989, ISBN 3322007162 .

literature

See also

Web links

Commons : Hermann Minkowski  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Hermann Minkowski  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Paragraph after David Hilbert: Hermann Minkowski, Gedächtnisrede in Göttingen, from May 1, 1909 in David Hilbert (Ed.): Collected treatises of Hermann Minkowski , Leipzig and Berlin, Teubner, 1911
  2. ↑ a b Hermann Minkowski in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / name used
  3. ↑ Minkowski on positive quadratic forms and on algorithms similar to broken chains , Journal für Reine und Angewandte Mathematik, Volume 107, 1891, p. 278
  4. ↑ Lemmermeyer, Schappacher, Foreword to the new edition of Hilbert's number report in English translation, The Theory of Algebraic Number Fields , Springer 1998
  5. ↑ [1] memorial plaques "M"
  6. ↑ Iris Grötschel: Grave of Hermann Minkowski in Berlin-Charlottenburg . On: Website of the Berlin Mathematical Society ( http://www.math.berlin/ ). August 2014. Accessed on November 23, 2019. Hans-Jürgen Mende : Lexicon of Berlin Burial Sites . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 , pp. 491–492.
  7. ↑ Template for information. Recognition and further preservation of graves of well-known and worthy personalities as honor graves of Berlin . Berlin House of Representatives, printed matter 12/4257 of April 15, 1994.
  8. ↑ Iris Grötschel: Grave of Hermann Minkowski in Berlin-Charlottenburg . On: Website of the Berlin Mathematical Society ( http://www.math.berlin/ ). August 2014. Retrieved November 23, 2019.
  9. ↑ Carolin Brühl: Not for eternity . In: Berliner Morgenpost . Sunday November 22, 2015. Retrieved November 23, 2019.
  10. ↑ With the memories of Minkowski's daughter Lily Rüdenberg of her father and Zassenhaus on the history of Hilbert's payment report.
personal data
SURNAME Minkowski, Hermann
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German mathematician and physicist
DATE OF BIRTH June 22, 1864
PLACE OF BIRTH Aleksotas , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH January 12, 1909
Place of death Goettingen