Widom was born in
Newark, New Jersey. He studied at
Stuyvesant High School, graduating in 1949, and was a member of the school's math team along with his brother,
physical chemist Benjamin Widom (1944, 1948). Widom attended
City College of New York until 1951, during which he was one of the winners of the
William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition (1951). At the
University of Chicago he obtained an
M.S. (1952) and
Ph.D., the latter on a thesis
Embedding of AW*-algebras advised by
Irving Kaplansky (1955). He taught mathematics at
Cornell University (1955–68) where he started his work on
Toeplitz and
Wiener-Hopf operators, partly inspired by
Mark Kac. were in
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, his mathematical contributions with his long-term collaborator
Craig Tracy have been recognized through the award of several prizes for their joint work on
Tracy–Widom distribution functions for
random matrices. They used integral operators to obtain explicit representations, in terms of
Painlevé transcendents, of the limiting distributions of the largest and smallest eigenvalues in many models of random matrices (see
Fredholm determinants). These same distributions have since been shown to arise in numerous other physical models, in random growth models, and in
asymptotic combinatorics. He has been the author of two books and more than 120 journal articles, and was an associate editor of
Asymptotic Analysis,
Journal of Integral Equations and Applications and Mathematical Physics,
Analysis, and
Geometry. He was an honorary editor of
Integral Equations and Operator Theory. Widom died from complications of
COVID-19 at home in
Santa Cruz, California, on January 20, 2021, at age 88. ==Awards==