In 1908, the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who had been one of Einstein’s teachers at the Zurich Polytechnic, completed Einstein’s reconceptualization of space and time and famously declared that “henceforth space as such and time as such shall recede to the shadows and only a kind of union of the two shall retain significance.”[4] Minkowski melded the three dimensions of space and the one time direction into a single four-dimensional entity: spacetime.
