In this book, the authors describe a continuum limit of the Toda ODE system, obtained by taking as initial data for the finite lattice successively finer discretizations of two smooth functions. Using the integrability of the finite Toda lattice, the authors adapt the method introduced by Lax and Levermore for the study of the small dispersion limit of the Korteweg de Vries equations to the case of the Toda lattice. A general class of initial data is considered which permits, in particular, the formation of shocks. A feature of the analysis in this book is an extensive use of techniques from...

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.