Herbert Blaine Lawson, Jr. is a mathematician best known for his work in minimal surfaces, calibrated geometry, and algebraic cycles.

He constructed compact minimal surfaces in the 3-sphere of arbitrary genus by applying Charles B. Morrey, Jr.'s solution of the Plateau problem in general manifolds.

The theory of calibrations, whose roots are in the work of Marcel Berger, finds its genesis in a 1982 Acta Mathematica paper of Reese Harvey and Blaine Lawson.

This theorem is the cornerstone of Lawson homology and morphic cohomology which are defined by taking the homotopy groups of algebraic cycle spaces of complex varieties.

He was a 1973 recipient of the American Mathematical Society's Leroy P. Steele Prize, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1995.