The World Just Lost One of Its Greatest Minds

Peter Lax. Photo: Konrad Jacobs. CC BY-SA 2.0 de

Peter Lax, one of the great minds of the 20th century, died May 16 in his Manhattan home. He was 99.

Peter won the Abel Prize, widely considered the Nobel Prize of Mathematics, and he did much to pave the way for the prodigious computerization of the modern world. As a math prodigy, Peter worked on the Manhattan Project and was instrumental in its success – at all of 19 years of age.

And I had the great good fortune to know him.