Tracy-Widom GUE law and symplectic invariants

Abstract: We establish the relation between two objects: an integrable system related to Painleve II equation, and the symplectic invariants of a certain plane curve \Sigma_{TW} describing the average eigenvalue density of a random hermitian matrix spectrum near a hard edge (a bound for its maximal eigenvalue). This explains directly how the Tracy-Widow law F_{GUE}, governing the distribution of the maximal eigenvalue in hermitian random matrices, can also be recovered from symplectic invariants.