Harold Widom
Harold Widom ( born September 23, 1932 in Newark, New Jersey) is an American mathematician who deals with analysis.
Life and work
Widom attended Stuyvesant High School in New York. From 1949 he studied at the City College of New York, won in 1951 the William Lowell Purnam Competition and studied at the University of Chicago, where he in 1952 his master's degree made and received his doctorate in 1955 at Irving Kaplansky ( Embedding of then AW * - algebras ). From 1955 he taught at Cornell University, where he turned under the influence of Mark Kac of the theory of Toeplitz operators. From 1968 he was professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he retired in 1994.
Widom focused on integral equations and integral and differential operators, especially operators and Toeplitz matrices and Wiener-Hopf operators. By 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.
Widom was 1964/65 Sloan Fellow and 1967/58 and 1972/73 Guggenheim Fellow. In 2007 he was awarded with Craig Tracy the Norbert Wiener Prize for Applied Mathematics and 2002 both received the George Pólya Prize of the SIAM. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. In 1962 he was invited speaker 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 pseudo- differential operators on bounded domains, Springer- Verlag, Berlin, New York 1985, ISBN 0-387-15701-8