Peter Lax, Mathematician: An Illustrated Memoir

Description

This book is a biography of one of the most famous and influential living mathematicians, Peter Lax. He is virtually unique as a preeminent leader in both pure and applied mathematics, fields which are often seen as competing and incompatible. Although he has been an academic for all of his adult life, his biography is not without drama and tragedy. Lax and his family barely escaped to the U.S. from Budapest before the Holocaust descended. He was one of the youngest scientists to work on the Manhattan Project. He played a leading role in coping with the infamous "kidnapping" of the NYU mathematics department's computer, in 1970. The list of topics in which Lax made fundamental and long-lasting contributions is remarkable: scattering theory, solitons, shock waves, and even classical analysis, to name a few. His work has been honored many times, including the Abel Prize in 2005. The book concludes with an account of his most important mathematical contributions, made accessible without heavy prerequisites. Reuben Hersh has written extensively on mathematics. His book with Philip Davis, The Mathematical Experience , won the National Book Award in science. Hersh is emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of New Mexico, USA. Dedication Contents Acknowledgments Permissions and Acknowledgments Introduction 1. A prodigy and his family have a narrow escape 2. Manhattan, NY, and Manhattan Project. An army private among the “Martians” 3. Family life: Son, husband, father, grandfather 4. Early career 5. The famous CDC 6600 bomb-scare adventure 6. Later career 7. The queen of Norway Entr’acte. Peter’s stories 8. Books 9. Pure AND applied, not VERSUS applied 10. Difference schemes. Shocks. Solitons. Scattering. Lax-Milgram. Pólya’s curve, etc. Epilogue Appendix 1. Anneli Lax Appendix 2. John von Neumann: The early years, the years at Los Alamos, and the road to computing Appendix 3. The life of Richard Courant Appendix 4. Peter D. Lax curriculum vitae Appendix 5. The closed graph theorem Appendix 6. List of Peter Lax’s doctoral students (from the Mathematics Genealogy Project) John Lax Appendix 7. From A Liberal Education, by Abbott Gleason, pages 314–317 on John Lax Appendix 8. John Lax article on Chicago jazz musicians References Index