Designed for undergraduate mathematics students or graduate students in the sciences. This book can be used in a prerequisite course for Statistics (for math majors) or Mathematical Modeling. The first eighteen chapters could be used in a one-quarter course, and the entire text is suitable for a one-semester course.

This book provides an elementary introduction to probability theory and its applications. The emphasis is on essential probabilistic reasoning, amply motivated, explained and illustrated with a large number of carefully selected samples. The fourth edition adds material related to mathematical finance, as well as expansions on stable laws and martingales.

A new feature of this edition consists of photogra phs of eight masters in the contemporary development of probability theory. All of them appear in the body of the book, though the few references there merely serve to give a glimpse of their manifold contributions. It is hoped that these vivid pictures will inspire in the reader a feeling that our science is a live endeavor created and pursued by real personalities. I have had the privilege of meeting and knowing most of them after studying their works and now take pleasure in introducing them to a younger generation. In collecting the photographs I had the kind assistance of Drs Marie-Helene Schwartz, Joanne Elliot, Milo Keynes and Yu. A. Rozanov, to whom warm thanks are due. A German edition of the book has just been published. I am most grateful to Dr. Herbert Vogt for his careful translation which resulted also in a consid erable number of improvements on the text of this edition. Other readers who were kind enough to send their comments include Marvin Greenberg, Louise Hay, Nora Holmquist, H. -E. Lahmann, and Fred Wolock. Springer-Verlag is to be complimented once again for its willingness to make its books "immer besser. " K. L. C. September 19, 1978 Preface to the Second Edition A determined effort was made to correct the errors in the first edition. This task was assisted by: Chao Hung-po, J. L. Doob, R. M. Exner, W. H.

Since their inception, the Perspectives in Logic and Lecture Notes in Logic series have published seminal works by leading logicians. Many of the original books in the series have been unavailable for years, but they are now in print once again. In this volume, the fourteenth publication in the Lecture Notes in Logic series, Fajardo and Keisler present new research combining probability theory and mathematical logic. It is a general study of stochastic processes using ideas from model theory, a key central theme being the question, 'When are two stochastic processes alike?' The authors assume some background in nonstandard analysis, but prior knowledge of model theory and advanced logic is not necessary. This volume will appeal to mathematicians willing to explore new developments with an open mind.

This accessible introduction to the theory of stochastic processes emphasizes Levy processes and Markov processes. It gives a thorough treatment of the decomposition of paths of processes with independent increments (the Lévy-Itô decomposition). It also contains a detailed treatment of time-homogeneous Markov processes from the viewpoint of probability measures on path space. In addition, 70 exercises and their complete solutions are included.

This is yet another indispensable volume for all probabilists and collectors of the Saint-Flour series, and is also of great interest for mathematical physicists. It contains two of the three lecture courses given at the 32nd Probability Summer School in Saint-Flour (July 7-24, 2002). Tsirelson's lectures introduce the notion of nonclassical noise produced by very nonlinear functions of many independent random variables, for instance singular stochastic flows or oriented percolation. Werner's contribution gives a survey of results on conformal invariance, scaling limits and properties of some two-dimensional random curves. It provides a definition and properties of the Schramm-Loewner evolutions, computations (probabilities, critical exponents), the relation with critical exponents of planar Brownian motions, planar self-avoiding walks, critical percolation, loop-erased random walks and uniform spanning trees.