Jacobs, Konrad · CC BY-SA 2.0 de

A Canadian-American mathematician regarded as among the most influential of the twentieth century for his work on partial differential equations, an area that underlies much of modern physics and engineering. His strong maximum principle for parabolic PDEs and the Newlander–Nirenberg theorem in complex geometry are now standard tools in the field, and his work helped found geometric analysis as a discipline bridging complex analysis and differential geometry. Decades after they were proved, his theorems remain part of the working vocabulary of mathematicians in the field.