We propose an explicit numerical method for the periodic Korteweg-de Vries equation. Our method is based on a Lawson-type exponential integrator for time integration and the Rusanov scheme for Burgers' nonlinearity. We prove first-order convergence in both space and time under a mild Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy condition τ = O(h), where τ and h represent the time step and mesh size, respectively, for solutions in the Sobolev space H 3 ((−π, π)). Numerical examples illustrating our convergence result are given.for the KdV equation with nonperiodic boundary condition [26,27,34]. Numerical methods for the Kadomtsev-Petviashvili equation, which is a two-dimensional generalization of the KdV equation, were considered in [10,22].For finite difference methods, linear stability has been analyzed in [11,36,38]. The explicit leap-frog scheme [36] and the Lax-Friedrichs scheme [38] require both the rather severe stability condition τ = O(h 3 ), where τ and h represent the discretization parameters in time and space, respectively. To weaken the stability restriction, some implicit FDM were proposed in [11,36]. Recently, the Lax-Friedrichs scheme with an implicit dispersion was proved to converge uniformly to the solution of the KdV equation for initial data in H 3 under the stability condition τ = O(h 3/2 ) for both the decaying case on the full line and the periodic case [19]. However, no convergence rate was obtained. Very recently, for the θ-right winded FDM, which applies the Rusanov scheme for the hyperbolic flux term and a 4-point θ-scheme for the dispersive term, first-order convergence in space was proved under a hyperbolic Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy (CFL) condition τ = O(h) for θ ≥ 1 2 and under an Airy Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy condition τ = O(h 3 ) for θ < 1 2 , for solutions in H 6 (R) [7]. On the other hand, the numerical approximation by Fourier spectral/pseudospectral methods has been studied by many authors [25,28]. Maday and Quarteroni [28] showed that for solutions in H r , the error of the Fourier spectral method is of order O(h r−1 ) in the L 2 norm while the error of the pseudospectral method is of order O(h r−2 ) in the H 1 norm. The corresponding L 2 estimate for the Fourier pseudospectral method was established in [25] with the aid of artificial viscosity to avoid the nonlinear instability caused by the aliasing error. More specifically, first-order convergence in time was shown in [25] for the fully discrete pseudospectral method under the stability condition τ = O(h 3 ) for explicit and τ = O(h 2 ) for implicit discretization of the nonlinear term, respectively. For the rigorous analysis of splitting methods, we refer to [17,20].Nowadays, exponential time integration methods are widely applied for parabolic and hyperbolic problems [3,15,16]. In particular, a distinguished exponential-type integrator was derived for the KdV equation [16] by using a "twisting" technique. For this integrator, firstorder convergence in time was proved without any CFL condition required. However, the success of this scheme strong...