Thomas Liggett was born on March 29, 1944 in Danville, Kentucky. At the age of two, he moved with his missionary parents to Latin America. His early education took place primarily in Buenos Aires, Argentina and San Juan, Puerto Rico. He attended college at Oberlin, where he became interested in probability theory under the influence of Samuel Goldberg, who had been a student of William Feller. He continued his study of probability at Stanford, taking many classes with Kai Lai Chung, and writing a thesis on problems related to the invariance principle with Samuel Karlin. In 1969 he joined the U...