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Peter D. Lax

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Presentation
 Univ. of New York, EE.UU.
Abel Prize 2005

Invitation for the act

Lecture

  • TUESDAY, October 30th
  • 20:00 p.m.
  • Place: Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporánea (CGAC)
  • TITLE OF THE LECTURE: The life and times of John von Neumann (simultaneous translation will be available)

Debate with researchers and students of the USC

  • Wednesday, October 31st
  • 12:30 p.m.
  • CENTRO DE ESTUDIOS AVANZADOS

The Abel Prize, awarded by the king of Norway in the own image of the Nobel Prizes in Sweden, awards the best mathematicians of the world (there is not a Nobel Prize of Mathematics).

The panel of judges awarded the Abel to Lax in 2005 because of "his innovative contributions to the theory of partial differential equations and the calculation of its solutions".

In any case, it is enough to say that Lax is one of the main mathematical wonders of the XXth century. He is considered the "mathematician more versatile of his generation", with seminal contributions to many branches of mathematics and also one of the founders of modern computational mathematics.

His scientific life is exciting: of Hungarian origin, he was persecuted by Nazis during his adolescence and ended up in the United States where he was discovered by other great scientific of Hungarian origin: John von Neumann, who made him his protégée realising his wonderful qualities, he introduced him to Albert Einstein and introduced him to the scientific elite of the USA.

In 1945, with only 19 years old, the young Peter Lax integrated the famous Manhattan Project, which built the first atomic bomb (and it was used for the neutron transport). He possibly is one of the last scientists that took part in that project and still remains alive.