Percy Alec Deift (born September 10, 1945) is a mathematician known for his work on spectral theory, integrable systems, random matrix theory and Riemann–Hilbert problems.
Life Deift was born in Durban, South Africa, where he obtained degrees in chemical engineering, physics, and mathematics, and received a Ph.D. in mathematical physics from Princeton University in 1977.Percy Deft, NYU Arts & Science He is a Silver Professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University.
Honors and awards Deift is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society (elected 2012),List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2012-11-10. a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 2003), and of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (elected 2009).Courant’s Percy Deift Elected to National Academy of Sciences, NYU Today, vol. 22 (2009), no. 11. Accessed January 13, 2010.Mathematics People, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 56 (2009), no. 7, p. 844
He is a co-winner of the 1998 Pólya Prize,SIAM Awards Pólya Prize, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, vo. 45 (1998), no. 10, p. 1363 and was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1999.Fellows list, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Accessed January 13, 2010. He gave an invited address at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin in 1998Professor Percy Deift , Integrable Systems, Rigorous Asymptotics and Applications Workshop, August 22–23, 2004, University of Melbourne. Accessed January 13, 2010 and plenary addresses in 2006 at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid and at the International Congress on Mathematical Physics in Rio de Janeiro.International Congress on Mathematical Physics - ICMP 2006 Deift gave the Gibbs Lecture at the Joint Meeting of the American Mathematical Society in 2009.Deift to Deliver the Gibbs Lecture Along with Michael Aizenman and Giovanni Gallavotti, he won the Henri Poincaré Prize in 2018.
Selected works with Eugene Trubowitz: Inverse scattering on the line, Communications on pure and applied Mathematics, vol. 32, 1979, pp. 121–251 with Fernando Lund, E. Trubowitz: with Richard Beals, Carlos Tomei: Direct and inverse scattering on the line, AMS, 1988 with Luen-Chau Li, C. Tomei: Loop groups, discrete versions of some classical integrable systems, and rank 2 extensions, AMS, 1992 with K. T-R McLaughlin: A continuum limit of the Toda lattice, AMS, 1998 Orthogonal polynomials and random matrices: a Riemann-Hilbert approach, AMS (American Mathematical Society), 2000 (and Courant Institute, 1999) with Dmitri Gioev: Random matrix theory: invariant embeddings and universality, AMS, 2009 with Jinho Baik and Toufic Suidan
See also Riemann–Hilbert problems random matrix theory integrable systems
References
External links Percy Deift personal webpage, Courant Institute, New York University Percy Alec Deift, Mathematics Genealogy Project