Thomas M. Liggett
Thomas Milton Liggett was a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles. He worked in probability theory, specializing in interacting particle systems.
Liggett had contributed to numerous areas of probability theory, including subadditive ergodic theory, random graphs, renewal theory, and was best known for his pioneering work on interacting particle systems, including the contact process, the voter model, and the exclusion process. His two books in this field have been influential.
Liggett was the managing editor of the Annals of Probability from 1985-1987. He held a Sloan Research Fellowship from 1973-1977, and a Guggenheim Fellowship from 1997-1998. He was the Wald Memorial Lecturer of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1996, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2008. He had been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2012, and in 2012 he also became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Liggett moved at the age of two with his missionary parents to Latin America, where he was educated in Buenos Aires and San Juan. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1965, where he was influenced towards probability by Samuel Goldberg, an ex-student of William Feller. He moved to Stanford, taking classes with Kai Lai Chung, and writing a PhD thesis in 1969 with advisor Samuel Karlin on problems associated with the invariance principle. He joined the faculty at UCLA in 1969, where he spent his career until his death in May 2020.
