The World Just Lost One of Its Greatest Minds

Peter Lax, one of the great minds of the 20^th 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. Peter’s first wife, Anneli, also a mathematician, was my mother’s best friend in New York in the 1960s, and as kids, my brothers and I played with Peter and Anneli’s kids.

Peter was born in Budapest on May Day 1926, and he and his family fled a Nazi Germany-allied and increasingly anti-semitic Hungary in 1941. Both of Peter’s parents were physicians – and Jewish. Peter told me his father was doctor to many prominent Hungarians, including movie stars and the prime minister, and he was convinced the Nazis wouldn’t bother him.

Peter’s mother was less convinced. She finally told Peter’s father she was leaving Hungary, and taking the kids with her, and he could stay if he wanted. Peter’s father capitulated and left with them.

Peter told me they got out by train to Switzerland on the last day before papers were checked on everyone leaving the country.

After arriving in the states, Peter went to work for the Manhattan Project, to develop the world’s first atomic bomb, the world’s first nuclear weapon. At one point in the 1990s or 2000s, I asked Peter about that. I told him I had heard that scientists working on the Manhattan Project thought their nascent bomb might ignite the world’s atmosphere. And I’ll never forget his response. His patented small, underspoken wry smile crossed his lips. “Well,” he said, “We thought that was unlikely.” Indeed.

But Peter was much more than a mathematical genius. He was a wonderful, beautiful human being. In the 1990s I was working for minimum wage at a small non-profit in Maine and I went down to New York to sell Christmas trees in a small lot behind The El Dorado, the somewhat ritzy Central Park West building Peter shared with Bono, Alec Baldwin and Kevin Bacon – and I stayed with Peter.

And when I, a minimum-wage Christmas tree vendor, arrived at the home of the great Peter Lax he pointed to a kitchen-table chair and said, “Sit there.” Then he liberated two Pilsner Urquells, his favorite beer, from the fridge, sat down across from me, popped the two beer bottles, handed me one and said, “OK, now tell me everything you’ve done since the last time I saw you.”

To this day I have never felt so fully and instantly at home in another person’s home.

Goodbye, Peter. I will miss you. I already do. Yours don’t come along every day.

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