Peter David Lax (born
May 1,
1926 in
Budapest,
Hungary) is a
mathematician working in the areas of 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.
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 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.
Lax holds a faculty position in the Department of Mathematics,
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences,
New York University.
He is a member of 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.
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.
Books
- 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).
- Decay of Solutions of Systems of Nonlinear Hyperbolic Conservation Laws, with J. Glimm, American Mathematical Society (1970).
- Recent Mathematical Methods in Nonlinear Wave Propagation, with G. Boillat, C. M. Dafermos, T.-P. Liu, and T. Ruggeri, Springer (1996).
- Scattering Theory for Automorphic Functions with R. S. Phillips, Princeton Univ. Press (2001).
- Calculus with Applications and Computing, with S. Burnstein and A. Lax, Springer-Verlag, New York (1979).
- Recent Advances in Partial Differential Equations
- Mathematical Aspects of Production and Distribution of Energy
- Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations in Applied Science
See also
