Peter Lax

Lax was born in Budapest, Hungary to a Jewish family.[2] Lax began displaying an interest in mathematics at age twelve, and soon his parents hired Rózsa Péter as a tutor for him.[3] His parents Klara Kornfield and Henry Lax were both physicians and his uncle Albert Kornfeld (also known as Albert Korodi) was a mathematician, as well as a friend of Leó Szilárd.

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 New York University. He attended a complex analysis class in the role of a student, but ended up taking over as instructor. He met his future wife, Anneli Cahn (married to her first husband at that time) in this class.[3][4]

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.

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 Kurt O. Friedrichs.[3][4]

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

He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters[5] and the National Academy of Sciences, USA. He won a Lester R. Ford Award in 1966[6] and again in 1973.[7] He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1986, the Wolf Prize in 1987, the Abel Prize in 2005 and the Lomonosov Gold Medal in 2013.[8] The American Mathematical Society selected him as its Gibbs Lecturer for 2007.[9] In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[10]

Lax is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher.[11] According to György Marx he was one of The Martians.[12]

Lax also received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1990[13]

In 1970, the Transcendental Students took a CDC 6600 super computer hostage at NYU's Courant Institute which Lax 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.[14][15]

• 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).
• Lax, Peter D. (2002). Functional Analysis (PDF). Pure and Applied Mathematics. New York: Wiley-Interscience. ISBN 978-0-471-55604-6. OCLC 47767143. Retrieved 22 July 2020.[16]
• 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 R. S. Phillips, Academic Press (1989), 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: Springer-Verlag. ISBN 978-0-387-22925-6. MR 2164867.[17]
• Lax, Peter D. (2005). Selected papers. Vol. II. Berlin, New York: Springer-Verlag. ISBN 978-0-387-22926-3. MR 2164868.

• Lax pair
• Lax–Milgram theorem
• Lax–Friedrichs method
• Lax–Wendroff method
• Lax–Richtmyer theorem, also called Lax equivalence theorem
• Babuška–Lax–Milgram theorem
• Undercompressive shock wave
• The Martians (scientists)

• 2016 Video Interview with Peter Lax by Atomic Heritage Foundation Voices of the Manhattan Project
• Peter Lax at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Peter Lax", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews.
• 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
• Dreifus, C. (29 March 2005). "A Conversation with Peter Lax: From Budapest to Los Alamos, a Life in Mathematics". The New York Times.
• Raussen, Martin; Christian Skau (February 2006). "Interview with Peter D. Lax" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society. 53 (2): 223–9.