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.

Harry Kesten was born in Duisburg, Germany in 1931,[6][7] 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.

[26] The Kesten memorial volume of Probability Theory and Related Fields[27] contains a full list of the dedicatee's publications.