Harold Widom (September 23, 1932 – January 20, 2021)[1][2] was an American mathematician best known for his contributions to operator theory and random matrices.

[4] 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).

[6] He taught mathematics at Cornell University (1955–68) where he started his work on Toeplitz and Wiener-Hopf operators, partly inspired by Mark Kac.

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).