Peter Lax

Peter David Lax, born in Budapest on 1 May 1926 and died on 16 May 2025, was a Hungarian-born American mathematician who won the Abel Prize in 2005. His family left Hungary for the United States in 1941. He worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project, at first as a calculator operator, and earned his PhD at New York University in 1949 under Kurt Friedrichs. He spent his career in the Department of Mathematics of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University and from 1963 directed the institute's computing facilities. His work on hyperbolic partial differential equations, shock waves and scientific computing gave his name to the Lax equivalence theorem, which explains when numerical computer approximations can be trusted, and to Lax pairs. In 1970 he and colleagues saved the institute's CDC 6600 supercomputer when student protesters held it hostage.