Peter David Lax (1 May 1926 – 16 May 2025) was a Hungarian-born American mathematician and Abel Prize laureate working in the areas of pure and applied mathematics.

Lax made important contributions to integrable systems, fluid dynamics and shock waves, solitonic physics, hyperbolic conservation laws, and mathematical and scientific computing, among other fields. 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.

Early life and education

Lax was born on 1 May 1926 in Budapest, Hungary, He began displaying an interest in mathematics at age twelve, and soon his parents hired Rózsa Péter as a tutor for him.

After the war ended, Lax remained with the Army at Los Alamos for another year, while taking courses at the University of New Mexico, then studied at Stanford University for a semester with Gábor Szegő and George Pólya.

Career

In 1954, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission put Lax and several of his colleagues at NYU in charge of using an early supercomputer to calculate the risk of flooding for a major nuclear reactor if a nearby dam were sabotaged; they concluded that the reactor would be safe. Beginning in 1963, Dr. Lax directed the Courant Institute's computing facilities.

Awards and honors

He was a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and the National Academy of Sciences, USA, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He won a Lester R. Ford Award in 1966 and again in 1973. In 1974, his shock wave article The American Mathematical Society selected him as its Gibbs Lecturer for 2007. In 2012, he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Lax is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher. According to György Marx he was one of The Martians.

Lax also received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1990.

The CDC 6600 incident

In 1970, as part of an anti-war protest, the Transcendental Students took hostage a CDC 6600 super computer at NYU's Courant Institute which Lax had been instrumental in acquiring; the students demanded $100,000 in ransom () to provide bail for a member of the Black Panthers. Some of the students present attempted to destroy the computer with incendiary devices, but Lax and colleagues managed to disable the devices and save the machine.

Books

  • Decay of Solutions of Systems of Nonlinear Hyperbolic Conservation Laws, with J. Glimm, American Mathematical Society (1970).
  • (Review)

See also

  • Babuška–Lax–Milgram theorem
  • Lions–Lax–Milgram theorem
  • The Martians (scientists)

References

  • 2016 Video Interview with Peter Lax by Atomic Heritage Foundation Voices of the Manhattan Project
  • Elements from his contributions to mathematics. Popularised presentation of Peter Lax by Helge Holden, published on the Abel Prize website.
  • Abel Prize press release and biography