Peter Lax

Peter David Lax was a Hungarian-born American mathematician and Abel Prize laureate working in pure and applied mathematics, with important contributions to integrable systems, fluid dynamics and shock waves. He showed an interest in mathematics at age twelve, was tutored by Rózsa Péter, and met John von Neumann, Richard Courant and Paul Erdős before emigrating. He studied at New York University, earned his PhD there in 1949, worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project, and held a faculty position at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, whose computing facilities he directed.