Peter David Lax | |
|---|---|
 Lax in 1969 | |
| Born | Lax Péter Dávid 1 May 1926 |
| Nationality | American, Hungarian |
| Alma mater | New York University |
| Known for | Lax equivalence theorem Lax pairs Lax–Milgram theorem Lax–Friedrichs method Lax–Wendroff method Lax–Wendroff theorem Beurling–Lax theorem HLLE solver Fourier integral operator |
| Awards |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | Courant Institute |
| Thesis | Nonlinear System of Hyperbolic Partial Differential Equations in Two Independent Variables (1949) |
| Doctoral advisor | K. O. Friedrichs |
| Doctoral students | |
Peter David Lax (born Lax Péter Dávid; 1 May 1926) is a Hungarian-born American mathematician and Abel Prize laureate working in the areas of pure and applied mathematics.
Lax 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.
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.[1]
- ^ Lewis, Adrian S.; Parrilo, Pablo A.; Ramana, Motakuri V. (2005). "The Lax conjecture is true". Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 133 (9): 2495–2499. arXiv:math/0304104. doi:10.1090/S0002-9939-05-07752-X. MR 2146191. S2CID 17436983.