Harry Kesten
Harry Kesten ( born November 19, 1931 in Germany ) is an American mathematician who worked on probability theory.
Life and work
Kesten emigrated with his family in 1933 in the Netherlands, where he visited the school. It was founded in 1958 with Mark Kac at Cornell University PhD (Symmetric random walk on groups). He was a year later, Instructor in Princeton and two years at the Hebrew University before he returned in 1961 as an Assistant Professor at Cornell University, went where until his retirement, he had a full professorship in 1965. Kesten dealt with percolation theory ( such as " first-passage percolation " as a model example for the spread of disease ), central limit theorems, stochastic processes and the theory of random walks ( random walks ) on graphs and groups. Mostly, he worked at Cornell with Frank Spitzer.
A conjecture of him and J. van den Berg from 1985 in the percolation theory ( Van den Berg - Kesten - Reimer inequality) was proved in 1996 by David Reimer.
Kesten was Sloan ( 1963-65 ) and Guggenheim Fellow (1972 /73). He received the Dutch Brouwer Medal ( 1981) and the George Pólya Prize of the SIAM (1994). In 2001 he received for his life's work the Leroy P. Steele Prize. He was invited speaker at the International Mathematical 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 kept on the ICM 2002 in Beijing a plenary lecture ( Some Highlights of Percolation ). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a foreign member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences. He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Writings (selection )
- Percolation theory for mathematicians. Birkhäuser, Stuttgart 1982, ISBN 3-7643-3107-0.
- Hitting probabilities for single points for processes of stationary independent increments ( Memoirs of the AMS, 93 ). AMS, Providence, R.I. In 1969.
- Probability on discrete structures (Encyclopedia of mathematical sciences; 110). Springer, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-540-00845-4.