As I noted just last month, DTLR does not dwell on mathematics very much, but a second exception seems just as warranted as my earlier post last month. Today we learn of the passing of Abel Prize laureate Peter D. Lax (1926-2025), a retired professor at the Courant Institute at NYU, last Friday. He was a highly accomplished pure and applied mathematician, who worked in the field of partial differential equations, and on numerical methods for their solution. Much of this work has direct relevance to applied physics and engineering, including fluid dynamics.
Prof. Lax is also the only Abel Prize winner I have ever met in person. It was just a brief meeting during a visit I made to the Courant Institute in the late 2000's on other business. We did not exchange many words, but I was honored to meet him.
I've attended lectures by at least two other Abel Prize winners, S.R.S. Varadhan and the late John Nash, but did not meet them face to face.
I'll take this chance to mention my encounters with winners of the other major international prizes in mathematics. As far as I know, I have neither met nor attended lectures by any of the Fields Medalists, except for Shing-Tung Yau. As for the Wolf Prize in Mathematics, both Lax and Yau are the only ones I've personally encountered as noted. Well, it must be evident that I don't attend math conferences or math lectures very often.