Liggett joined the faculty at
UCLA in 1969, where he spent his entire career. He became a professor in the mathematics department in 1976, and served as department chair from 1991 to 1994. He retired in 2011, but remained active within the department. He was the advisor of
Norman Matloff 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. ==Personal life==