Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.

Hermann Minkowski was a mathematician and professor at the University of Konigsberg, the University of Zurich, and the University of Gottingen, described variously as German, Polish, or Lithuanian-German, or Russian. He created and developed the geometry of numbers and elements of convex geometry, and used geometrical methods to solve problems in number theory, mathematical physics, and the theory of relativity.