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Harold Widom br> Professor Emeritus University of California Santa Cruz
Ph.D. University of Chicago 1955 Office: McHenry 4176 Phone: 831-459-2652 Fax: 831-459-3260 E-mail: widom@math.ucsc.edu Another Widom on the web is daughter Jennifer. |
Research Interests
Honors and Awards
Recent Publications
Selected Publications
Full Publication List
Ph.D. Students
Research Interests
Harold Widom's early research was in the areas of integral equations and operator
theory, in particular the study of Toeplitz and Wiener-Hopf operators, and the asymptotic behavior of the spectra of various classes
of operators. The latter was looked at from the point of view of pseudodifferential operators on manifolds, and some new and
unifying spectral asymptotic results were obtained using this approach.
A later interest was the theory of random matrices, an active area of research by mathematicians and physicists. For some questions integral operators play a central role. Widom has, with collaborators, used ideas from operator theory to obtain new results in random matrix theory. One such is the explicit representation in terms of Painlevé transcendents of the limiting distributions of the largest and smallest eigenvalues in many models of random matrices. These same distributions have since been shown to arise in numerous other physical models, in random growth models, and in asymptotic combinatorics.
A current interest, in the interface between statistical mechanics and probability, is interacting particle systems. In collaboration with Craig A. Tracy both exact and asymptotic formulas were obtained for the asymmetric simple exclusion process, a stochastic model for transport phenomena. These results have had application to questions of universality in mathematical physics. Back to the top
Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2007
Norbert Wiener Prize of AMS and SIAM (shared with C. A. Tracy), 2007
George Polya Prize of SIAM (shared with Craig A. Tracy), 2002
Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, 1972-73
Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, 1967-68
Sloan Foundation Fellowship, 1964-65
NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship, 1959-60
Bobette Thorsen, 1992. An Asymptotic Expansion for the Trace of Certain Integral Operators
Shuxian Lou, 1992. The Second Order Asymptotics of a Class of Integral Operators with Discontinuous Symbols
Xiang Fu, 1991. Asymptotics of Toeplitz Matrices with Symbols of Bounded Variations
Richard Libby, 1990. Asymptotics of Determinants and Eigenvalue Distributions for Toeplitz Matrices Associated with Certain Discontinuous Symbols
Ray Roccaforte, 1982. Asymptotic Expansions of Traces for Certain Convolution Operators
Estelle Basor, 1975. Asymptotic Formulas for Toeplitz Determinants
Lidia Luquet, 1972. p-Norm Inequalities for Entire Functions