Mathematician:Peter David Lax

Mathematician

Hungarian-born American mathematician working in the areas of pure and applied mathematics.

Made important contributions to integrable systems, fluid dynamics and shock waves, solitonic physics, hyperbolic conservation laws, and mathematical and scientific computing, among other fields.

Nationality

Hungarian-American

History

• Born: 1 May 1926 in Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary

Theorems and Definitions

• Lax-Wendroff Method (with Burton Wendroff)
• Lax Equivalence Theorem
• Lax-Milgram Theorem (with Arthur Norton Milgram)
• Babuška-Lax-Milgram Theorem (with Ivo M. Babuška and Arthur Norton Milgram)
• Lions-Lax-Milgram Theorem (with Jacques-Louis Lions and Arthur Norton Milgram)
• Lax Pair

Publications

• 1954: Parabolic Equations (Annals of Mathematics Studies  no. 33: 167 – 190) (with Arthur Norton Milgram)
• 1970: Decay of Solutions of Systems of Nonlinear Hyperbolic Conservation Laws (with J. Glimm)
• 1979: Calculus with Applications and Computing (with S. Burstein and A. Lax)
• 1989: Scattering Theory (with R.S. Phillips)
• 1987: Hyperbolic Systems of Conservation Laws and the Mathematical Theory of Shock Waves
• 1996: Recent Mathematical Methods in Nonlinear Wave Propagation (with G. Boillat, C.M. Dafermos, T.-P. Liu and T. Ruggeri)
• 2001: Scattering Theory for Automorphic Functions (with R.S. Phillips)
• 2002: Functional Analysis
• 2006: Hyperbolic Partial Differential Equations
• 2007: Linear Algebra and Its Applications (2nd ed.)
• 2012: Complex Proofs of Real Theorems (with Lawrence Zalcman)

Also known as

His name at birth, in the Hungarian style, was Lax Péter Dávid.

Sources

• John J. O'Connor and Edmund F. Robertson: "Peter David Lax": MacTutor History of Mathematics archive