Lajos Pukánszky (1928-1996) was a Hungarian and American mathematician noted for his work in representation theory of solvable Lie groups.
He was born in Budapest on November 24, 1928, defended his thesis in 1955 at the University of Szeged under Béla Szőkefalvi-Nagy, but left Hungary in 1956.
In 1988 a conference entitled "The Orbit Method in Representation Theory" was held at the University of Copenhagen in honor of his sixtieth birthday.
Pukánszky's early work concerned von Neumann algebras and related subjects.
A bulk of his later work was devoted to the unitary representation theory of solvable Lie groups.