Harry Kesten (November 19, 1931 – March 29, 2019) was a Jewish American mathematician best known for his work in probability, most notably on random walks on groups and graphs, random matrices, branching processes, and percolation theory.

Biography

Harry Kesten was born in Duisburg, Germany in 1931, and grew up in the Netherlands, where he moved with his parents in 1933 to escape the Nazis. Surviving the Holocaust, Kesten initially studied chemistry, and later theoretical physics and mathematics, at the University of Amsterdam. He moved to the United States in 1956 and received his PhD in Mathematics in 1958 at Cornell University under the supervision of Mark Kac. He was an instructor at Princeton University and the Hebrew University before returning to Cornell in 1961. Kesten died on March 29, 2019, in Ithaca at the age of 87.

Mathematical work

Kesten's work includes many fundamental contributions across almost the whole of probability, including the following highlights. A volume of papers was published in Kesten's honor in 1999. The Kesten memorial volume of Probability Theory and Related Fields contains a full list of the dedicatee's publications.

Selected works