Craig Tracy, professor of mathematics, and Harold Widom of UC Santa Cruz will share the 2007 Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics, presented jointly by the American Mathematical Society and the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

The Norbert Wiener Prize is presented "for an outstanding contribution to applied mathematics in the highest and broadest sense." The $5,000 prize was instituted in 1967 and is awarded only every three years.

Tracy and Widom were honored for their work on random matrix theory, which allows mathematicians to measure the probability of events that are dependent on each other. Random matrix theory has turned out to have wide applications in statistics, physics and engineering, ranging from card shuffling problems to climate change and wireless communications.

Tracy earned his bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Missouri, Columbia, in 1967 and a doctorate in physics from the State University of New York, Stony Brook, in 1973. He has been a professor of mathematics at UC Davis since 1984 and chaired the Department of Mathematics from 1994 to 1998.

In 2002, Tracy and Widom shared the $20,000 George Polya Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics for their work, and in 2006 they were both elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The prize was presented Jan. 6 at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in New Orleans.