45. Peter David Lax

President, 1979–1980

Ph.D. New York University, New York, 1949

Lax was born in Hungary, and received his A.B. (1947) and Ph.D. (1949) from New York University. Since then he has spent his career at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, and in 2005 was awarded the prestigious international Abel Prize for his groundbreaking contributions to the theory and application of partial differential equations and to the computation of their solutions.

Among the many distinctions conferred on Lax are the AMS/SIAM Norbert Weiner Prize in Applied Mathematics in 1975 (for his broad contributions to applied mathematics, in particular, for his work on numerical and theoretical aspects of partial differential equations and on scattering theory); the U.S. National Medal of Science in 1986; the Wolf Prize in 1987; and the AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize in 1995. Lax is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

Additional information

• MR Author Profile
• History of the Second Fifty Years: American Mathematical Society, 1939-1988 , by Everett Pitcher (AMS, 1988), which includes AMS Presidents from 1939-1988 (and reports on all aspects of the Society during the period.)
• Mathematics Genealogy Project
• 2005 Abel Prize to Peter D. Lax press release, Norwegian Academy of Sciences.
• Fellow of the AMS
• Photographs in "Who's That Mathematician? Images from the Paul R. Halmos Photograph Collection"
• The MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive