Harold Widom

Harold Widom (born September 23, 1932 in Newark , New Jersey ) is an American mathematician who deals with analysis .

Live and act

Widom attended Stuyvesant High School in New York . From 1949 he studied at the City College of New York , won the William Lowell Purnam Competition in 1951 and then studied at the University of Chicago , where he obtained his master’s degree in 1952 and his doctorate under Irving Kaplansky in 1955 ( Embedding of AW * -algebras ). From 1955 he taught at Cornell University , where he turned to the theory of Toeplitz operators under the influence of Mark Kac . From 1968 he was a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz , where he retired in 1994.

Widom dealt with integral equations and integral and differential operators, especially Toeplitz operators and matrices and Wiener-Hopf operators. With Craig Tracy he also worked on random matrices (Tracy-Widom distribution functions of the eigenvalues), where he applied methods from the theory of integral operators.

Harold Widom (left) with Craig Tracy

Widom was a Sloan Research Fellow in 1964/65 and a Guggenheim Fellow in 1967/58 and 1972/73 . In 2007 he and Craig Tracy received the Norbert Wiener Prize for Applied Mathematics and in 2002 both received the George Pólya Prize from SIAM . He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society . In 1962 he gave a lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm ( Eigenvalues of n-dimensional convolution operators ).

He is the brother of the physicist Benjamin Widom .

Works

Lectures on measure and integration , Van Nostrand, New York 1969
Lectures on integral equations , Van Nostrand, New York 1969
Asymptotic expansions for pseudodifferential operators on bounded domains , Springer-Verlag, Berlin New York 1985, ISBN 0-387-15701-8
with Tracy: Fredholm Determinants, Differential Equations and Matrix Models, Comm. Math. Phys., Vol. 163, 1994, pp. 33-72, Arxiv
with Tracy: Level-Spacing Distributions and the Airy Kernel, Comm. Math. Phys. Vol. 159, 1974, pp. 151-174, Arxiv
with Tracy: Introduction to Random Matrices, Springer, Lecture Notes in Physics 424, 1993, pp. 103-130, Arxiv

literature

Estelle Basor, Israel Gohberg (editor): Toeplitz Operators and related topics: the Harold Widom anniversary volume , Birkhäuser 1994 (workshop in Santa Cruz 1992)

Web links

Individual evidence

↑ Dates of birth according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
↑ Tracy, Widom, Level spacing distributions and the Airy Kernel, Comm. Math. Phys., Vol. 159, 1994, pp. 151-174

personal data
SURNAME	Widom, Harold
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH	September 23, 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH	Newark , New Jersey

[1] Dates of birth according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004

[2] Tracy, Widom, Level spacing distributions and the Airy Kernel, Comm. Math. Phys., Vol. 159, 1994, pp. 151-174