american mathematicians
Craig Tracy
1945 births | american mathematicians | dartmouth university faculty | state university of new york at stony brook alumni | university of california, davis faculty | university of missouri alumniCraig Arnold Tracy (September 9 1945) is an American mathematician, known for his contributions to mathematical physics and probability theory.
Born in United Kingdom, he moved as infant to Missouri where he grew up and obtained a B.Sc. in physics from University of Missouri (1973). He studied as a Woodrow Wilson fellow at the State University of New York, Stony Brook where he obtained a Ph.D. on the thesis entitled Spin-Spin Scale-Functions in the Ising and XY-Models advised by Barry McCoy (1973).38709 In this work, jointly with Tai T. Wu, Barry McCoy, and Eytan Barouch, he studied Painlevé functions in exactly solvable statistical mechanical models.
Harold Widom
american mathematicians | city college of new york alumni | cornell university faculty | people from new york city | stuyvesant high school alumni | university of california, santa cruz faculty | university of chicago alumniHarold Widom is an American mathematician, born in New York City.
Education
He studied at Stuyvesant High School (1949), He earned a B.Sc. from City College of New York (1951), M.S. from University of Chicago (1952) and a Ph.D. from the same place, advised by Irving Kaplansky (1955). He taught mathematics at Cornell University (1955-68) where he started his work on Toeplitz matrix and Wiener-Hopf operators, partly inspired by Mark Kac. He worked at University of California, Santa Cruz (1968-), where he became professor emeritus (1994).Research homepage at UCSC.
His research areas were 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, in collaboratin with Craig Tracy, he has achieved mathematical fame and received several major prizes, for the Tracy-Widom distribution functions for random matrices. Integral operators allowed explicit representation in terms of Painlevé transcendents of the limiting distributions of the largest and smallest eigenvalues in many models of random matrices. These same distributions have since been shown to arise in numerous other physical models, in random growth models, and in asymptotic combinatorics.
James Murdoch Austin
1915 births | 2000 deaths | 20th century mathematicians | american mathematicians | american meteorologists | chaos theorists | massachusetts institute of technology alumni | massachusetts institute of technology faculty | people from concord, massachusetts | people from new zealandJames Murdoch Austin, (1915-2000) was notable for his pioneering modeling of the meteorology of air pollution, especially that of smokestack particulates. He is also notable as the doctoral advisor of the pioneer of chaos theory, Edward Norton Lorenz.
Yuan-Shih Chow
1924 births | 20th century mathematicians | 21st century mathematicians | american mathematicians | chinese americans | living peopleYuan-Shih Chow (Chinese: 周元燊, Pinyin: Zhōu Yuánshēn) (1924-), also known as Y.S.Chow or Zhou Yuanshen, is a Chinese American probabilist (mathematician). Currently he is a professor emeritus, Columbia University, USA.
He is the former chief director of the Institute of Mathematics, Academia Sinica, and the director of the Center of Applied Statistics, Nankai University (Tianjin). He is an academician of the Academia Sinica.
John Todd (computer science)
20th century mathematicians | american mathematiciansJohn Todd (1911 Ireland - June 21, 2007, Pasadena, California) was a professor of mathematics and a pioneer in the field of numerical analysis.
He was born in Ireland and grew up near Belfast. He received his BSc degree from Queen's University in 1931, and went to St. John's College at Cambridge University.
