Hans Lewy
Wolf Prize Laureate in Mathematics 1985
Hans Lewy
Affiliation at the time of the award:
University of California at Berkeley, USA
Award citation:
“for initiating many, now classic and essential, developments in partial differential equations”.
Prize share:
Hans Lewy
Kunihiko Kodaira
Working in Germany in the 1920’s and subsequently in the United States, Professor Hans Lewy has laid the foundations to some of the most fruitful theories in partial differential equations and their applications. His early work with Courant and Friedrichs, 1928, heralded the development of numerical methods for solving partial differential equations and later led to a stability theory for finite difference equations. He produced the famous example of a smooth linear partial differential equation having no solution. His other contributions include the study of the Monge-Ampere equation, work in fluid dynamics and the theory of cavities, and an early study of variational inequalities. In all these topics his ideas, have been fundamental and his results most original.