Toeplitz Operators and Random Matrices

Book excerpt: This volume is dedicated to the memory of Harold Widom (1932–2021), an outstanding mathematician who has enriched mathematics with his ideas and ground breaking work since the 1950s until the present time. It contains a biography of Harold Widom, personal notes written by his former students or colleagues, and also his last, previously unpublished paper on domain walls in a Heisenberg–Ising chain. Widom's most famous contributions were made to Toeplitz operators and random matrices. While his work on random matrices is part of almost all the present-day research activities in this field, his work in Toeplitz operators and matrices was done mainly before 2000 and is therefore described in a contribution devoted to his achievements in just this area. The volume contains 18 invited and refereed research and expository papers on Toeplitz operators and random matrices. These present new results or new perspectives on topics related to Widom's work.