Short answers, pulled from the story.
Minkowski spacetime is a four-dimensional framework in which space and time are not separate entities but are intermingled into a single space-time. Hermann Minkowski developed it by 1908 to provide a geometric foundation for Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity (1905), using the invariant interval as the central mathematical concept.
Hermann Minkowski was born on the 22nd of June 1864 in Aleksotas, in the Suwałki Governorate of the Kingdom of Poland, a region that was part of the Russian Empire from that year. Different sources describe his nationality as German, Polish, Lithuanian-German, or Russian.
In 1883, Minkowski was awarded the Mathematics Prize of the French Academy of Sciences for his manuscript on the theory of quadratic forms. He was eighteen years old, and he shared the prize with eminent English mathematician Henry Smith, who received it posthumously. The award caused severe unrest among English mathematicians, but the prize committee never changed its decision.
In 1896, Minkowski presented the geometry of numbers, a method that used geometric properties in n-dimensional space to solve problems in number theory. He developed the approach through earlier research into the arithmetic of quadratic forms with n variables.
Yes. While Minkowski taught at the Eidgenössisches Polytechnikum in Zürich, the institution now known as ETH Zurich, Einstein was among his students. Minkowski later provided the geometric framework for the special theory of relativity that Einstein published in 1905.
Minkowski died of appendicitis in Göttingen on the 12th of January 1909. He was forty-four years old. Max Born delivered the obituary on behalf of the mathematics students, and David Hilbert wrote a personal obituary describing Minkowski as his best and most dependable friend since their student years.