Peter Lax

Peter David Lax

Peter Lax in Tokyo, 1969
Born 1 May 1926 (1926-05-01) (age 84)
Budapest, Hungary
Nationality United States American
Fields Mathematics
Institutions Courant Institute
Alma mater Stuyvesant High School
Courant Institute
Doctoral advisor K. O. Friedrichs
Doctoral students Burton Wendroff
Alexandre Chorin
Ami Harten
James Sethian
Jeffrey Rauch
Known for Lax–Wendroff method
Lax equivalence theorem
Babuška-Lax-Milgram theorem
Lax pairs
Notable awards National Medal of Science (1986)

Wolf Prize (1987)

Norbert Wiener Prize (1975)

Abel Prize (2005)

Peter David Lax (born 1 May 1926 in Budapest, Hungary) is a mathematician working in the areas of pure and applied mathematics. He has made important contributions to integrable systems, fluid dynamics and shock waves, solitonic physics, hyperbolic conservation laws, and mathematical and scientific computing, among other fields. Lax is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher.[1]

In a 1958 paper Lax stated a conjecture about matrix representations for third order hyperbolic polynomials which remained unproven for over four decades. Interest in the "Lax conjecture" grew as mathematicians working in several different areas recognized the importance of its implications in their field, until it was finally proven to be true in 2003.[2]

Lax was born in Budapest, Hungary, and moved with his parents (Klara Kornfield and Henry Lax) to New York City in 1941, where he studied at Stuyvesant High School.[3] In 1948 he married Anneli Cahn, who also was on her way to becoming a career mathematician.

Lax holds a faculty position in the Department of Mathematics, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1986, the Wolf Prize in 1987 and the Abel Prize in 2005.

He is an alumnus of New York University, where he received both his bachelor's degree in 1947 with Phi Beta Kappa honors and his Ph.D. in 1949 with thesis advisor Kurt O. Friedrichs.

Contents

The CDC 6600 Incident

In 1970, the Transcendental Students took a CDC 6600 computer hostage at NYU's Courant Institute which he had been instrumental in acquiring. Some of the students present, possibly members of the Weathermen, threatened to destroy the computer with incendiary devices, but Lax managed to disable the devices and save the machine. [4]

Books

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Thomson ISI. "Lax, Peter D., ISI Highly Cited Researchers". http://hcr3.isiknowledge.com/author.cgi?&link1=Browse&link2=Results&id=3419. Retrieved 2009-06-20. 
  2. ↑ A. S. Lewis; P. A. Parrilo, M. V. Ramana (2003-04-18). "The Lax conjecture is true". Optimization Online. http://www.optimization-online.org/DB_HTML/2003/04/641.html. Retrieved 2007-10-31. 
  3. ↑ Dreifus, Claudia (2005-03-29). "A Conversation with Peter Lax - From Budapest to Los Alamos, a Life in Mathematics". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/29/science/29conv.html. Retrieved 2007-10-31. 
  4. ↑ Philip Colella (April 26, 2004). "Peter Lax". Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. http://history.siam.org/oralhistories/lax.htm. 

External links

Laureates of the Wolf Prize in Mathematics

Israel Gelfand / Carl L. Siegel (1978) · Jean Leray / André Weil (1979) · Henri Cartan / Andrey Kolmogorov (1980) · Lars Ahlfors / Oscar Zariski (1981) · Hassler Whitney / Mark Krein (1982) · Shiing-Shen Chern / Paul Erdős (1983/4) · Kunihiko Kodaira / Hans Lewy (1984/5) · Samuel Eilenberg / Atle Selberg (1986) · Kiyoshi Itō / Peter Lax (1987) · Friedrich Hirzebruch / Lars Hörmander (1988) · Alberto Calderón / John Milnor (1989) · Ennio de Giorgi / Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro (1990) · Lennart Carleson / John G. Thompson (1992) · Mikhail Gromov / Jacques Tits (1993) · Jürgen Moser (1994/5) · Robert Langlands / Andrew Wiles (1995/6) · Joseph Keller / Yakov G. Sinai (1996/7) · László Lovász / Elias M. Stein (1999) · Raoul Bott / Jean-Pierre Serre (2000) · Vladimir Arnold / Saharon Shelah (2001) · Mikio Sato / John Tate (2002/3) · Grigory Margulis / Sergei Novikov (2005) · Stephen Smale / Hillel Fürstenberg (2006/7) · Pierre Deligne / Phillip A. Griffiths / David B. Mumford (2008)  · Dennis Sullivan / Shing-Tung Yau (2010)
 · Arts · Chemistry · Mathematics · Medicine · Physics
Abel Prize laureates

Jean-Pierre Serre (2003) · Michael Atiyah / Isadore Singer (2004) · Peter Lax (2005) · Lennart Carleson (2006) · S. R. Srinivasa Varadhan (2007) · John G. Thompson / Jacques Tits (2008) · Mikhail Gromov (2009) · John Tate (2010)
United States National Medal of Science laureates
 
Mathematical, statistical, and computer sciences
1960s

1963: Norbert Wiener · 1964: Solomon Lefschetz · H. Marston Morse · 1965: Oscar Zariski · 1966: John Milnor · 1967: Paul Cohen · 1968: Jerzy Neyman · 1969: William Feller
1970s

1970: Richard Brauer · 1973: John Tukey · 1974: Kurt Gödel · 1975: John W. Backus · Shiing-Shen Chern · George Dantzig · 1976: Kurt Otto Friedrichs · Hassler Whitney · 1979: Joseph Leo Doob · Donald E. Knuth
1980s

1982: Marshall Harvey Stone · 1983: Herman Goldstine · Isadore Singer · 1986: Peter Lax · Antoni Zygmund · 1987: Raoul Bott · Michael Freedman · 1988: Ralph E. Gomory · Joseph B. Keller · 1989: Samuel Karlin · Saunders MacLane · Donald C. Spencer
1990s

1990: George F. Carrier · Stephen Cole Kleene · John McCarthy · 1991: Alberto Calderón · 1992: Allen Newell · 1993: Martin David Kruskal · 1994: John Cocke · 1995: Louis Nirenberg · 1996: Richard Karp · Stephen Smale · 1997: Shing-Tung Yau · 1998: Cathleen Synge Morawetz · 1999: Felix Browder · Ronald R. Coifman
2000s

2000: John Griggs Thompson · Karen K. Uhlenbeck · 2001: Calyampudi R. Rao · Elias M. Stein · 2002: James G. Glimm · 2003: Carl R. de Boor · 2004: Dennis P. Sullivan · 2005: Bradley Efron · 2006: Hyman Bass · 2007: Leonard Kleinrock · Andrew J. Viterbi ·