Celebratio Mathematica

In this video, cour­tesy of UCLA's In­sti­tute of Pure and Ap­plied Math­em­at­ics (IPAM) and the Si­mons Found­a­tion, Tom Lig­gett lec­tures in April 2018 at IPAM on the res­ults in his last re­search pa­per, “Ap­prox­im­at­ing mul­tiples of strong Rayleigh ran­dom vari­ables”:

On the sub­ject of this re­search, volume ed­it­ors Am­ber Puha and Paul Jung write:

As we began so­li­cit­ing for art­icles, trib­utes, and pho­tos for this volume, Wen­pin Tang (Columbia Uni­versity) con­tac­ted us, bring­ing to our at­ten­tion Tom Lig­gett’s fi­nal work-in-pro­gress con­cern­ing strong Rayleigh dis­tri­bu­tions. Tom had com­mu­nic­ated with Wen­pin (then a postdoc­tor­al schol­ar at UCLA) about this pro­ject ex­tens­ively, and even shared drafts of the work, al­though Wen­pin didn’t have the most re­cent draft. Tom’s son, Tim Lig­gett, combed through Tom’s com­puter to find and share with us “ver­sion three”. We found the draft to be mostly com­plete, need­ing only minor ed­it­or­i­al com­ments. The con­tents ex­tend res­ults in [1]. Wen­pin en­thu­si­ast­ic­ally agreed to serve as an ed­it­or, and we con­tac­ted Subhro Gosh who agreed to re­view the art­icle. We are thrilled to share Tom Lig­gett’s last work — this video lec­ture and the ed­ited pa­per [2] — with the math­em­at­ic­al com­munity.