Background
Kesten grew up in the Netherlands, where he moved with his parents in 1933 to escape the Nazis.
Kesten grew up in the Netherlands, where he moved with his parents in 1933 to escape the Nazis.
He received his Doctor of Philosophy in 1956 at Cornell University under supervision of Mark Kac.
He was an instructor at Princeton University and the Hebrew University before returning to Cornell where he is now professor emeritus of mathematics. Kesten"s work includes a number of fundamental contributions, including the following. Showing that amenability is equivalent to zero spectral gap and that a regular tree of degree has spectral radius His work with Hillel Furstenberg on products of random matrices Enumerations of self-avoiding walks and a "pattern theorem".
Resolving a conjecture of Erdős and Szűsz on the discrepancy of irrational rotations Kesten did much work on percolation including proving that the critical probability of bond percolation on the square lattice equals 1/2, demonstrating the so-called scaling relations and writing the first book on percolation directed towards mathematicians.
Giving an upper bound for the growth of arms in diffusion-limited aggregation His work with Vladas Sidoravicius on the spread of an infection in a moving population.
American Mathematical Society. National Academy of Sciences.