Peter Lax

Peter David Lax (born 1 May 1926) is a Hungarian-born American 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.

Life and education

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

The family left Hungary on November 15, 1941, and traveled via Lisbon to the United States. As a high school student at Stuyvesant High School, Lax took no math classes, but competed on the school math team; in 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. In a complex analysis class that he had begun 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).