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Happy Birthday!

Peter D. Lax
BORN: May 1, 1926, Budapest, Hungary

Winner of the National Medal of Science (1986), the Wolf Prize (1987) and the Abel Prize (2005).  Congratulations to a wonderful scholar and an outstanding citizen of our mathematics community.  Coincidentally, he seldom misses the AMS-MAA National Meeting!


 Peter D. Lax has been described as the most versatile mathematician of his generation.  To quote the citation from the Abel Committee, Lax received the 2005 Prize "for his groundbreaking contributions to the theory and application of partial differential equations and to the computation of their solutions."

"Compared to physics or chemistry, mathematics is a very broad subject.  It is true that nobody can know it all, or even nearly all.  But it is also true that as mathematics develops, things are simplified and unusual connections appear.

Geometry and algebra for instance, which were so very different 100 years ago, are intricately connected today."
  Peter D. Lax, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University