Lawrence Sirovich

Sirovich was born to Jewish immigrants from Poland and raised in Brownsville, a working-class immigrant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. He gained entrance to the Brooklyn Technical H.S., an experience which first opened his eyes to the possibilities of the world. There he was captain of the math team and years later, in 2018, inducted into the BTHS Hall of Fame. Sirovich attended Johns Hopkins University as an undergraduate math major, and as a graduate student in aeronautical engineering (where applied mathematics was practiced). In 1958, jointly with Johns Hopkins University, he became a research assistant at the Courant Institute at NYU. It was there that he wrote his PhD dissertation "On the Kinetic Theory of Steady Gas Flows" in 1960. At the Courant Institute, K.O. Friedrichs, a mathematician of great insight and taste, was his most influential teacher. For Sirovich, taking a course with Friedrichs on asymptotics was a life-changing experience. Another early mentor at the Courant Institute was Fritz John, a mathematician of the highest character with whom Sirovich later started the eminent Applied Mathematical Sciences series, of Springer-Verlag Publishing.

In 2018 Mathew Sirovich honored his parents by endowing the Carole & Lawrence Sirovich Chair of Public Health at Brown University.

Their daughter Brenda Sirovich was born in 1963, and received a B.A. in math and biology from Harvard. She is the co-director of the VA Outcomes Group at Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine. Their son Matthew was born in 1966. Matt studied math and economics at Brown University, and is currently a board member there.

Sirovich met Carole Hochman, a number theorist, at the Courant Institute. Their first date took place on September 4, 1960 and they married October 16th, 1960. Carole received her PhD from the Courant Institute and later became Chair of the Department of Math and Science at the Pratt Institute, which she retired from in 2017.