Special relativity (alternative formulations)
Hendrik Lorentz and Henri Poincaré developed their version of special relativity in a series of papers from about 1900 to 1905. They used Maxwell's equations and the principle of relativity to deduce a theory that is mathematically equivalent to the theory later developed by Einstein.
History of special relativity
Poincaré's attempt of a four-dimensional reformulation of the new mechanics was not continued by himself, so it was Hermann Minkowski (1907), who worked out the consequences of that notion (other contributions were made by Roberto Marcolongo (1906) and Richard Hargreaves (1908)). This was based on the work of many mathematicians of the 19th century like Arthur Cayley, Felix Klein, or William Kingdon Clifford, who contributed to group theory, invariant theory and projective geometry. Using similar methods, Minkowski succeeded in formulating a geometrical interpretation of the Lorentz transformation. He completed, for example, the concept of four vectors; he created the Minkowski diagram for the depiction of space-time; he was the first to use expressions like world line, proper time, Lorentz invariance/covariance, etc.; and most notably he presented a four-dimensional formulation of electrodynamics. Similar to Poincaré he tried to formulate a Lorentz-invariant law of gravity, but that work was subsequently superseded by Einstein's elaborations on gravitation.