May 01, 2013
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Peter David Lax (born 1 May 1926) is a mathematician working in both 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.

 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. In 1948 he married Anneli Cahn, who also was on her way to becoming a career mathematician.

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.

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.

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 and 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.

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. The incident played a role in the resignation of Juergen Moser, director of the Courant Institute in 1967 – 1970.