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.

Minkowski is perhaps best known for his work in relativity in which he showed in 1907 that his former student Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity (1905) presented algebraically by Einstein could also be understood geometrically as a theory of four-dimensional space-time. Hermann Minkowski (June 22 1864 – January 12 1909) was a mathematician.