This volume contains lectures given at the Saint-Flour Summer School of Probability Theory during the period 8th-24th July, 1999. We thank the authors for all the hard work they accomplished. Their lectures are a work of reference in their domain. The School brought together 85 participants, 31 of whom gave a lecture concerning their research work. At the end of this volume you will find the list of participants and their papers. Finally, to facilitate research concerning previous schools we give here the number of the volume of "Lecture Notes" where they can be found: Lecture Notes in Mathematics 1975: n ° 539- 1971: n ° 307- 1973: n ° 390- 1974: n ° 480- 1979: n ° 876- 1976: n ° 598- 1977: n ° 678- 1978: n ° 774- 1980: n ° 929- 1981: n ° 976- 1982: n ° 1097- 1983: n ° 1117- 1988: n ° 1427- 1984: n ° 1180- 1985-1986 et 1987: n ° 1362- 1989: n ° 1464- 1990: n ° 1527- 1991: n ° 1541- 1992: n ° 1581- 1993: n ° 1608- 1994: n ° 1648- 1995: n ° 1690- 1996: n ° 1665- 1997: n ° 1717- 1998: n ° 1738- Lecture Notes in Statistics 1971: n ° 307- Table of Contents Part I Erwin Bolthausen: Large Deviations and Interacting Random Walks 1 On the construction of the three-dimensional polymer measure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 2 Self-attracting random walks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 3 One-dimensional pinning-depinning transitions. . . . . . . . . . . 105 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

This book contains work-outs of the notes of three 15-hour courses of lectures which constitute surveys on the concerned topics given at the St. Flour Probability Summer School in July 1992. The first course, by D. Bakry, is concerned with hypercontractivity properties and their use in semi-group theory, namely Sobolev and Log Sobolev inequa- lities, with estimations on the density of the semi-groups. The second one, by R.D. Gill, is about statistics on survi- val analysis; it includes product-integral theory, Kaplan- Meier estimators, and a look at cryptography and generation of randomness. The third one, by S.A. Molchanov, covers three aspects of random media: homogenization theory, loca- lization properties and intermittency. Each of these chap- ters provides an introduction to and survey of its subject.

The book is a collection of 80 short and self-contained lectures covering most of the topics that are usually taught in intermediate courses in probability theory and mathematical statistics. There are hundreds of examples, solved exercises and detailed derivations of important results. The step-by-step approach makes the book easy to understand and ideal for self-study. One of the main aims of the book is to be a time saver: it contains several results and proofs, especially on probability distributions, that are hard to find in standard references and are scattered here and there in more specialistic books. The topics covered by the book are as follows. PART 1 - MATHEMATICAL TOOLS: set theory, permutations, combinations, partitions, sequences and limits, review of differentiation and integration rules, the Gamma and Beta functions. PART 2 - FUNDAMENTALS OF PROBABILITY: events, probability, independence, conditional probability, Bayes' rule, random variables and random vectors, expected value, variance, covariance, correlation, covariance matrix, conditional distributions and conditional expectation, independent variables, indicator functions. PART 3 - ADDITIONAL TOPICS IN PROBABILITY THEORY: probabilistic inequalities, construction of probability distributions, transformations of probability distributions, moments and cross-moments, moment generating functions, characteristic functions. PART 4 - PROBABILITY DISTRIBUTIONS: Bernoulli, binomial, Poisson, uniform, exponential, normal, Chi-square, Gamma, Student's t, F, multinomial, multivariate normal, multivariate Student's t, Wishart. PART 5 - MORE DETAILS ABOUT THE NORMAL DISTRIBUTION: linear combinations, quadratic forms, partitions. PART 6 - ASYMPTOTIC THEORY: sequences of random vectors and random variables, pointwise convergence, almost sure convergence, convergence in probability, mean-square convergence, convergence in distribution, relations between modes of convergence, Laws of Large Numbers, Central Limit Theorems, Continuous Mapping Theorem, Slutsky's Theorem. PART 7 - FUNDAMENTALS OF STATISTICS: statistical inference, point estimation, set estimation, hypothesis testing, statistical inferences about the mean, statistical inferences about the variance.

This volume contains lectures given at the 31st Probability Summer School in Saint-Flour (July 8-25, 2001). Simon Tavaré’s lectures serve as an introduction to the coalescent, and to inference for ancestral processes in population genetics. The stochastic computation methods described include rejection methods, importance sampling, Markov chain Monte Carlo, and approximate Bayesian methods. Ofer Zeitouni’s course on "Random Walks in Random Environment" presents systematically the tools that have been introduced to study the model. A fairly complete description of available results in dimension 1 is given. For higher dimension, the basic techniques and a discussion of some of the available results are provided. The contribution also includes an updated annotated bibliography and suggestions for further reading. Olivier Catoni's course appears separately.

This book provides a systematic, self-sufficient and yet short presentation of the mainstream topics on introductory Probability Theory with some selected topics from Mathematical Statistics. It is suitable for a 10- to 14-week course for second- or third-year undergraduate students in Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Finance, or Economics, who have completed some introductory course in Calculus. There is a sufficient number of problems and solutions to cover weekly tutorials.

In World Mathematical Year 2000 the traditional St. Flour Summer School was hosted jointly with the European Mathematical Society. Sergio Albeverio reviews the theory of Dirichlet forms, and gives applications including partial differential equations, stochastic dynamics of quantum systems, quantum fields and the geometry of loop spaces. The second text, by Walter Schachermayer, is an introduction to the basic concepts of mathematical finance, including the Bachelier and Black-Scholes models. The fundamental theorem of asset pricing is discussed in detail. Finally Michel Talagrand, gives an overview of the mean field models for spin glasses. This text is a major contribution towards the proof of certain results from physics, and includes a discussion of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick and the p-spin interaction models.