Benjamin Lax

Benjamin Lax (29 December 1915 - 21 April 2015) was a Hungarian-born solid-state and plasma physicist. He immigrated to the United States with his family in 1926 and received his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Cooper Union in 1941. During World War II, Lax worked on radar development at MIT's Radiation Laboratory. He later obtained his Ph.D. from MIT in 1949, focusing on the breakdown of gases at high frequencies under magnetic fields. Lax joined MIT's Lincoln Laboratory in 1951, where he conducted research on semiconductors and made significant contributions to the understanding of their energy band structure. His work was instrumental in the development of semiconductor devices, and he was a co-inventor on an early patent for semiconductor lasers.