Newsroom

CORVALLIS, Ore. - The 2006 Lonseth Lecture in the Department of Mathematics at Oregon State University will be presented on Tuesday, May 2, by Peter Lax, an internationally recognized mathematician from the Courant Institute at New York University.

The presentation, titled "Degenerate Symmetric Matrices," will be at 2 p.m. at the LaSells Stewart Center on the OSU campus. It is free and open to the public.

Lax is the recipient of the 2005 Abel Prize in mathematics, which is modeled after the Nobel Prize and recognized his "groundbreaking contributions to the theory and application of partial differential equations."

Lax has also received many other career honors and awards, including the National Medal of Science, the Lester R. Ford Award, the Chauvenet Prize, the Semmelweis Medal, the Wiener Prize, and the Wolf Prize. His leadership on the National Science Board in the 1980s was pivotal for today's scientific computing possibilities. A panel he chaired recommended that the National Science Foundation make supercomputers available to university scientists, and this led to the establishment of five national computing centers, as well as the NSFnet.