The Minkowski World

Abstract—This essay is written on the occasion of the 160th anniversary of the birth of Hermann Minkowski and devoted to the analysis of his creative heritage from the perspective of modern physics. Considerable attention is paid to the issue of relevance and optimal methods for teaching the four-dimensional picture of event space in high schools and universities. The researcher may be interested in those parts of the paper that discuss the unresolved conceptual and mathematical problems which arose in connection with Minkowski’s great geometric insight.