Harry Kesten

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Harry Kesten, Cornell 1970

Harry Kesten (born November 19, 1931 in Duisburg , Germany ; † March 29, 2019 in Ithaca , New York ) was an American mathematician who dealt with probability theory.

Live and act

Kesten emigrated with his family to the Netherlands in 1933 , where he attended school. He received his doctorate in 1958 under Mark Kac at Cornell University ( Symmetric random walk on groups ). He was then an instructor at Princeton and two years at Hebrew University , before he returned to Cornell University as an assistant professor in 1961, where he was a full professor from 1965 and was most recently Goldwin Smith professor . Kesten dealt with percolation theory (such as "first-passage percolation" as a model for. Example for the spread of disease), central limit theorems, stochastic processes and the theory of random walks ( random walks ) on graphs and groups. Sometimes he worked with Frank Spitzer in Cornell .

A conjecture made by him and J. van den Berg in 1985 in percolation theory (Van den Berg-Kesten-Reimer inequality) was proven in 1996 by David Reimer .

Kesten was a Sloan Research Fellow (1963–65) and a Guggenheim Fellow (1972–73). He received the Dutch Brouwer Medal (1981) and the George Pólya Prize from SIAM (1994). In 2001 he received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for his life's work . He was invited speaker at the international mathematicians' congresses in Nice 1970 (Hitting of sets by processes with stationary independent increments) and Warsaw 1983 (Percolation theory and resistance of random electrical networks) and gave a plenary lecture at the ICM 2002 in Beijing (Some Highlights of Percolation ). He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1999) as well as a foreign member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences . He was a fellow of the American Mathematical Society .

Fonts (selection)

as an author
  • Percolation theory for mathematicians . Birkhäuser, Stuttgart 1982, ISBN 3-7643-3107-0 .
  • What is percolation? , Notices AMS 2006, PDF file (58 kB)
  • Hitting probabilities for single points for processes of stationary independent increments (Memoirs of the AMS; 93). AMS, Providence, RI 1969.
  • with Harry Fürstenberg : Products of random matrices , Ann. Math. Statist., Vol. 31, 1960, pp. 457-469.
  • Aspects of first-passage percolation , in: PL Hennequin (ed.), Ecole d'été de Probabilités de Saint-Flour XIV, Lecture Notes in Math 1180, Springer-Verlag, 1986, pp. 125-264.
  • On the speed of convergence in first-passage percolation , Ann. Appl. Probab., Vol. 3, 1993, pp. 296-338.
as editor
  • Probability on discrete structures (Encyclopedia of Mathematical Sciences; 110). Springer, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-540-00845-4 .

literature

  • Maury Bramson (Ed.): Perplexing problems in probability. Festschrift in Honor of Harry Kesten . Birkhäuser, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-7643-4093-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Date of birth according to American Men and Women of Science . 21. Ed. Thomson Gale, Detroit 2004, ISBN 0-7876-6523-1 (8 vols.).
  2. ^ Matt Hayes: Probability expert Harry Kesten, Ph.D. '58, this at 87th Cornell Chronicle, April 8, 2019, accessed April 27, 2019 .