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Abstract Hermann Minkowski’s contributions to relativity theory are ex-traordinary from a disciplinary standpoint, in that so few mathematicians in Wilhelmine Germany took an interest in theoretical physics. Based on cor-respondence, lectures, research notes and the accounts of his students and colleagues, Minkowski’s interest in mechanics and physics is retraced, from his early career to his discovery of spacetime. The theory of spacetime discovered by the Göttingen mathematician Her-mann Minkowski (1864–1909) is known to many from his lecture “Raum und Zeit, ” delivered at the annual meeting of the German Association for Natu-ral Scientists and Physicians in Cologne, on 21 September 1908. As the first speaker in the first mathematics session of the congress, Minkowski argued famously that certain circumstances required scientists to discard the tradi-tional view of physical space as an Euclidean three-space, in favor of a four-dimensional geometry characterized by the invariance of a certain quadratic form. Grandiloquent in style, Minkowski’s lecture struck a chord among sci