Peter Lax

Peter David Lax (1926 to 2025) was a Hungarian-born American mathematician who worked in pure and applied mathematics and received the Abel Prize in 2005. Born in Budapest, he left Hungary with his family in 1941, studied at New York University and took his doctorate there in 1949 under Kurt Friedrichs. He worked at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project and spent his career at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, where he also directed the computing facilities from 1963. He made contributions to integrable systems, fluid dynamics and shock waves, hyperbolic conservation laws and scientific computing. Results bearing his name include the Lax equivalence theorem on when numerical approximations are reliable, Lax pairs for the study of solitons, and the Lax-Phillips semigroup in scattering theory. His honours include the National Medal of Science in 1986 and the Wolf Prize in 1987.