Peter Lax

Peter David Lax (born Lax Péter Dávid; 1 May 1926) is a Hungarian-born American mathematician and Abel Prize laureate working in the areas of pure and applied mathematics.

Lax has made important contributions to

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.^[1]

Life and education

Lax was born in

The family left Hungary on 15 November 1941, and traveled via Lisbon to the United States. As a high school student at Stuyvesant High School, Lax took no math classes but did compete on the school math team. During this time, he met with John von Neumann, Richard Courant, and Paul Erdős, who introduced him to Albert Einstein.

As he was still 17 when he finished high school, he could avoid military service, and was able to study for three semesters at

Before being able to complete his studies, Lax was drafted into the U.S. Army. After basic training, the Army sent him to Texas A&M University for more studies. He was then sent to Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and soon afterwards to the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico. At Los Alamos, he began working as a calculator operator, but eventually moved on to higher-level mathematics.^{[citation needed]}

After the war ended, he 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.^[3]

Lax returned to NYU for the 1946–1947 academic year, and by pooling credits from the four universities at which he had studied, he graduated that year. He stayed at NYU for his graduate studies, marrying Anneli in 1948 and earning a PhD in 1949 under the supervision of

Lax holds a faculty position in the Department of Mathematics, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University.^[5]

Awards and honors

He is a member of the

Lax also received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1990.^[17]

The CDC 6600 incident

In 1970, as part of an anti-war protest, the

• Calculus with Applications and Computing, with S. Burstein and A. Lax, Springer-Verlag, New York (1979).
• Complex Proofs of Real Theorems, with Lawrence Zalcman, University Lecture Series, 2012; 90 pp; softcover, Volume: 58,
  ISBN 978-0-8218-7559-9
• Decay of Solutions of Systems of Nonlinear Hyperbolic Conservation Laws, with J. Glimm, American Mathematical Society (1970).
• OCLC 47767143. Retrieved 22 July 2020.^[20]
• Functional Analysis, Wiley-Interscience, New York (2002)
• Hyperbolic Partial Differential Equations, American Mathematical Society/Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences (2006).
• Hyperbolic Systems of Conservation Laws and the Mathematical Theory of Shock Waves, Society for Industrial Mathematics (1987).
• Linear Algebra and Its Applications, 2nd ed.,
  Wiley-Interscience
  , New York (2007).
• Mathematical Aspects of Production and Distribution of Energy
• Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations in Applied Science
• Recent Advances in Partial Differential Equations
• Recent Mathematical Methods in Nonlinear Wave Propagation, with G. Boillat, C. M. Dafermos, T.-P. Liu, and T. Ruggeri, Springer (1996).
• Scattering Theory, with
  ISBN 0-12-440051-5
  .
• Scattering Theory for Automorphic Functions with R. S. Phillips, Princeton Univ. Press (2001).
• Lax, Peter D. (2005). Selected papers. Vol. I. Berlin, New York:
  MR 2164867.^[21]
• Lax, Peter D. (2005). Selected papers. Vol. II. Berlin, New York:
  MR 2164868
  .

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

Notes