probability

We mourn the passing of our colleague Craig Tracy. 

Craig Tracy was an American mathematician known for his contributions to mathematical physics and probability theory. Born in 1945 in England to a British mother and an American father, Craig was raised on a farm in Missouri. After obtaining a B.Sc. in Physics from University of Missouri (1967), he studied at Stony Brook University, where he obtained a Ph.D. in Physics with the thesis Spin-Spin Scale-Functions in the Ising and XY-Models (1973), advised by Barry M. McCoy. 

During the 2023-2024 academic year, my second year as chair, I focused on getting the new degree requirements approved and on adapting the Group to the new budgetary challenges that the University is facing. 

Swati Patel and Axel Saenz Rodriguez are Assistant Professors in the Mathematics Department at Oregon State University (OSU) in Corvallis, OR. Saenz Rodriguez and Patel were both graduate students in the Math and Applied Math Department at UC Davis, where they first met. They are now married and have two beautiful and energetic children. Patel works in math bio, modeling systems arising from evolution, disease dynamics and ecology. Saenz Rodriguez works in probability and math physics, analyzing universal probabilistic objects for one-dimensional interacting particle systems.

Craig was my first graduate student. He has had an extremely productive and distinguished career. Over the decades since I first met Craig we have shared many adventures together. It is hard to believe that he is retiring.