Mark Kac
Lee Dembart Pioneer Mathematician Mark Kac Dies, Los Angeles Times, Oct., 1984
Mark Kac [1914-1984], a professor of mathematics at the University of Southern California who was a pioneer in probability theory and in its application to number theory, died of cancer Thursday at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. He was 70 years old.
A native of Poland, Kac came to the United States in 1938 and became one of the foremost mathematicians of his generation, earning election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.
Before coming to USC in 1981, he spent 20 years as a professor of mathematics and theoretical physics at Rockefeller University in New York. Before that he was a professor of mathematics at Cornell University.
Besides his commanding mathematical skills, Kac (pronounced Katz) was a superb conversationalist, raconteur and lecturer. He always had a smile and a quip handy.
Once he was in the audience when Richard Feynman, a Caltech physicist, was giving a lecture. Feynman, who liked to make fun of mathematicians, said that if mathmatics did not exist, physicists could reconstruct it in six days.
Kac immediately exclaimed, "That's the time that it took God to create the world."
Kac made his best-known contribution with Feynman in what is known as the Feynman-Kac formula, which overlaps probability and theoretical physics.
"He had a knack for giving very simple solutions to problems tht had defied other people's efforts," Gian-Carlo Rota of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recalled. "His solutions were sometimes so simple that people who had been frustrated in trying to solve them would become irritated at the simplicity of his solutions."
During his student days in the 1930s in Lwow, Poland, Kac joined with other eminent Polish mathematicians-including Kazimir Kuratowski, Stefan Banach, Waclaw Sierpinski and Stanislaw Ulam-in a series of conversations at the Scottish Cafe. Several of Kac's problems are included in the journal of those meetings which was published as The Scottish Book.
In his autobiography, Adventures of a Mathematician, Ulam wrote, "Mark is one of the very few mathematicians who possess a tremendous sense of what the real applications of mathematics are and can be."
During his career, Kac wrote about 150 research papers, many on imaginative and original themes. One of them-"Can One Hear the Shape of a Drum?"-discusses how to determine the shape of the source of a sound from its acoustic properties.
Kac's autobiography, Enigmas of Chance, will be published soon by Harper and Row as part of the Sloan Fou survived by his wife, Katherine, a son, Michael, who is a professor of linguistics at the University of Minnesndation Book Series.
Kac isota, and a daughter, Deborah of Santa Monica. Kac lived in Culver City.