Mark Kac

Mark Kac (1914 to 1984) was a Polish-born American mathematician who helped build modern mathematical probability and its applications to statistical physics. Born in Krzemieniec, then in the Russian Empire, he studied at the University of Lwow under Hugo Steinhaus and took his doctorate in 1937. He emigrated to the United States in 1938, taught at Cornell for more than twenty years, then at Rockefeller University and finally at the University of Southern California. The Feynman-Kac path integral carries his name, he worked with Paul Erdos on probabilistic methods in number theory, and his 1966 article asking whether one can hear the shape of a drum became a classic, earning him the Chauvenet Prize. He also wrote Statistical Independence in Probability, Analysis and Number Theory.