Download or read book Orthogonal Polynomials and Random Matrices: A Riemann-Hilbert Approach written by Percy Deift and published by American Mathematical Soc.. This book was released on 2000 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume expands on a set of lectures held at the Courant Institute on Riemann-Hilbert problems, orthogonal polynomials, and random matrix theory. The goal of the course was to prove universality for a variety of statistical quantities arising in the theory of random matrix models. The central question was the following: Why do very general ensembles of random n times n matrices exhibit universal behavior as n > infinity? The main ingredient in the proof is the steepest descent method for oscillatory Riemann-Hilbert problems. Titles in this series are copublished with the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.