Hermann Minkowski · Public domain

A mathematician who gave Einstein's special theory of relativity its geometric shape: in 1907 he recast space and time as a single four-dimensional structure, now called Minkowski spacetime, that made the theory's strange consequences visible as geometry rather than algebra. He also founded the geometry of numbers, a field applying geometric methods to problems in number theory, while teaching at Königsberg, ETH Zürich, and Göttingen.