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Harold Widom (September 23, 1932 – January 20, 2021) was an American mathematician best known for his contributions to operator theory and random matrix. He was appointed to the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1968 and became professor emeritus in 1994.
Widom was appointed in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and became professor emeritus in 1994. His research areas homepage at UCSC. were in integral equations and operator theory, in particular the determination of the spectra of a semi-infinite Toeplitz matrix 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 (which generalize both integral and partial differential operators) on manifolds.
More recently, his mathematical contributions with his long-term collaborator Craig Tracy have been recognized through the award of several prizes for their joint work on Tracy–Widom distribution functions for random matrices. They used integral operators to obtain explicit representations, in terms of Painlevé transcendents, of the limiting distributions of the largest and smallest eigenvalues in many models of random matrices (see Fredholm determinants). These same distributions have since been shown to arise in numerous other physical models, in random growth models, and in asymptotic combinatorics.
He has been the author of two books and more than 120 journal articles, and was an associate editor of Asymptotic Analysis, Journal of Integral Equations and Applications and Mathematical Physics, Analysis, and Geometry. He was an honorary editor of Integral Equations and Operator Theory.
Widom died from complications of COVID-19 at home in Santa Cruz, California, on January 20, 2021, at age 88.
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