The Men Behind the Math
Richard Courant
1888 - 1972
Hans Lewy
1905 - 1988
Kurt Otto Friedrichs
1901 - 1982
Hungarian mathematician Peter Lax, who moved to America with his family in 1941, was one of the youngest members of the secret "Manhattan Project" that developed the nuclear bomb during WWII. In 2005 he was awarded the Abel Prize (the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for mathematicians) for his work on partial differential equations (such as those used to describe the motion of gases).
American mathematician Burton Wendroff also worked at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (where many of the former Manhattan Project scientists continued on to following the end of WWII), and later became a professor of mathematics at the University of Denver during the late '60s and early '70s. He is now an adjunct professor at University of New Mexico.
Peter Lax
b. 1926
Burton Wendroff
b. 1930
German mathematician Richard Courant, who fled Nazi Germany at a very young age, is most known as being responsible for the establishment of the mathematics department at New York University. The department is now called the Courant Institute in his honor. His greatest mathematical achievements include the development and implementation of what he called the finite element method.
German mathematician Hans Lewy, who also fled the growing Nazi empire in the early 1930s, spent most of his professional career at the University of California - Berkeley where he developed his theories on partial differential equations.
German mathematician Kurt Otto Friedrichs, who had worked with Courant in Germany, joined him in the US at NYU in the early 1930s.
