Harold Widom facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Harold Widom
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| Born | 23 September 1932 Newark, New Jersey, U.S.
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| Died | 20 January 2021 (aged 88) Santa Cruz, California, U.S.
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| Alma mater | University of Chicago City College of New York |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | Cornell University University of California, Santa Cruz |
| Doctoral advisor | Irving Kaplansky |
Harold Widom (born September 23, 1932 – died January 20, 2021) was an American mathematician. He was famous for his important work in a part of math called operator theory and with random matrices. These are like special rules for numbers and tables of random numbers. He worked at the University of California, Santa Cruz from 1968. He became a retired professor, known as a professor emeritus, in 1994.
Harold Widom's Early Life and Studies
Harold Widom was born in Newark, New Jersey. He went to Stuyvesant High School and finished in 1949. He was part of the school's math team, just like his brother, Benjamin Widom.
He then studied at City College of New York until 1951. While there, he won the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition in 1951. This is a very challenging math contest for college students.
Harold Widom continued his studies at the University of Chicago. He earned his Master of Science (M.S.) degree in 1952. Later, in 1955, he received his Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy). His advanced research was guided by Irving Kaplansky.
Teaching and Research Discoveries
From 1955 to 1968, Harold Widom taught mathematics at Cornell University. During this time, he started working on special math problems called Toeplitz and Wiener-Hopf operators. Another mathematician, Mark Kac, helped inspire some of his early ideas.
In 1968, Widom joined the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He became a retired professor there in 1994. His main areas of research involved integral equations and operator theory. He especially focused on understanding how certain math problems behave. He also studied how these problems change over time.
More recently, Harold Widom worked closely with his friend and colleague, Craig Tracy. Together, they made big discoveries about Tracy–Widom distribution functions. These are special math patterns found in random matrices. They used advanced math tools to show how these patterns appear. Their work helped explain how the largest and smallest numbers behave in many random number tables.
These same math patterns have since been found in many other areas. This includes how things grow randomly and in a field called asymptotic combinatorics.
Harold Widom wrote two books and more than 120 articles for math journals. He also helped edit several important math magazines.
He passed away at his home in Santa Cruz, California, on January 20, 2021. He was 88 years old.
Awards and Honors
Harold Widom received many awards for his important contributions to mathematics:
- He became a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012.
- He shared the Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics with Craig Tracy in 2006.
- He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006.
- He shared the George Pólya Prize with Craig Tracy in 2002. This was for their work on random matrices.
- He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1967 and 1972.
- He received a Sloan Fellowship from 1964 to 1965.
- He was awarded a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship from 1959 to 1960.
