Harold Widom's work in random matrix theory
arXiv:2201.05665
Abstract
This is a survey of Harold Widom's work in random matrices. We start with his pioneering papers on the sine-kernel determinant, continue with his and Craig Tracy's groundbreaking results concerning the distribution functions of random matrix theory, touch on the remarkable universality of the Tracy-Widom distributions in mathematics and physics, and close with Tracy and Widom's remarkable work on the asymmetric simple exclusion process.
16 pages, 4 figures. To appear in Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 59 (2022), no. 2