Book Description

This volume contains the proceedings of a conference held at the Courant Institute in 2006 to celebrate the 60th birthday of Percy A. Deift. The program reflected the wide-ranging contributions of Professor Deift to analysis with emphasis on recent developments in Random Matrix Theory and integrable systems. The articles in this volume present a broad view on the state of the art in these fields. Topics on random matrices include the distributions and stochastic processes associated with local eigenvalue statistics, as well as their appearance in combinatorial models such as TASEP, last passage percolation and tilings. The contributions in integrable systems mostly deal with focusing NLS, the Camassa-Holm equation and the Toda lattice. A number of papers are devoted to techniques that are used in both fields. These techniques are related to orthogonal polynomials, operator determinants, special functions, Riemann-Hilbert problems, direct and inverse spectral theory. Of special interest is the article of Percy Deift in which he discusses some open problems of Random Matrix Theory and the theory of integrable systems.