Combinatorics of dispersionless integrable systems and universality in random matrix theory (Q1048141)

The authors connect directly the dispersionless integrable systems with combinatorial problems associated with random matrix ensembles and apply this connection for combinatorial problems such as counting ribbon graphs on a compact surface of genus zero, and give a universality result for the dispersionless integrable systems which is an analogue of that for the random matrix ensembles. This universality, in the case of Gaussian ensembles, is explicitly demonstrated by computing the leading orders of the free energies in the expansions and it is shown that this universality holds in general for the leading orders of the unitary, orthogonal, and symplectic ensembles.