Craig Tracy
Craig Arnold Tracy ( born September 9, 1945 in London) is an American theoretical physicist and mathematician.
Tracy was born the son of a stationed in England U.S. soldiers and a British woman and grew up in Missouri. He studied physics at the University of Missouri (Bachelor 1967) and Columbia University and a doctorate in 1973 in physics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook ( SUNY ) at Barry McCoy. As a postdoctoral researcher, he was at the University of Rochester, at SUNY and at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. From 1978 he was assistant professor of mathematics at Dartmouth College, where he became Associate Professor in 1983. Since 1984 he has been Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Davis. 1994 to 1998 he served on the board of the local mathematical faculty, since 2003 he is Distinguished Professor. 1992 and 2001 /02, he was Director of the Institute of Theoretical Dynamics, Davis. He has been a visiting Professor at RIMS in Kyoto.
As a student of McCoy he was first engaged in the 1970s with aspects of the Ising model of statistical mechanics, in particular, exact formulas for the correlation functions in two-dimensional scaling limit case ( with McCoy, Tai Tsun Wu ), but also with other lattice models.
He is best known for studies with Harold Widom on random matrices and their applications. Here they generalized a formula for the density of the eigenvalues of random matrices, first Michio Jimbo, Mikio Sato, Tetsuji Miwa Mori and disclosures in 1980 for the GUE (Gaussian Unitary Ensemble ). The examined by Tracy and Widom formula gives the density of states as Fredholmdeterminante an integral operator, the kernel of the integral operator occurring in the two functions satisfy coupled linear differential equations. The occurring differential equations of Painleve type also appeared already on in the work of Tracy, McCoy, Wu and Barouch to correlation functions in the Ising model.
Tracy and Widom resulted in her work and new distribution functions ( Tracy- Widom distributions ), with applications in stochastics and combinatorics (such as longest subsequence problem by Stanislaw Ulam Increasing, paving, random walks ).
1967/68 he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. In 2002 he was awarded with the Widom George Pólya Prize of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics ( SIAM ) and the 2007 Norbert Wiener Prize. Since 2006 he is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.