Konrad Jacobs · CC BY-SA 2.0 de

A Hungarian-born mathematician who fled Nazi persecution with his family in 1941 and went on to become one of the most versatile figures in twentieth-century applied mathematics, working on shock waves, fluid dynamics, and hyperbolic conservation laws. In 1958 he posed a conjecture about matrix representations of hyperbolic polynomials that took mathematicians more than forty years to prove, finally resolved in 2003. He won the Abel Prize in 2005 for the breadth and impact of that body of work.