Craig Tracy
Craig Arnold Tracy 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.
He studied as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow
at the Stony Brook University where he obtained a Ph.D. on the thesis entitled Spin-Spin Scale-Functions in the Ising and XY-Models
advised by Barry M. McCoy,
in which he studied Painlevé functions in exactly
solvable statistical mechanical models.
He then was on the faculty of Dartmouth College before
joining University of California, Davis where he is now
a professor. With Harold Widom he worked on the asymptotic analysis of Toeplitz determinants and their various operator theoretic generalizations. This work gave them both the George Pólya and the Norbert Wiener prizes, and the Tracy–Widom distribution is named after them.Awards
