Michel Dekking, Cor Kraaikamp, Rik Lopuhaä and Ludolf Meester are professors in the Department of Applied Mathematics at TU Delft, The Netherlands. The material in this book has been successfully taught there for several years, and at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, and Wesleyan University, USA, since 2003.

From the reviews: "[the material is] superbly motivated with interest-grabbing examples... exercises excellent and plentiful." Edward Williams, University of Michigan-Dearborn, USA "... it is a notoriously hard task to introduce probability and statistics with a mix of intuition and mathematics to keep students motivated. Therefore, I very much welcome this book and recommend it as course material." Sara van de Geer, Leiden University, The Netherlands "This textbook provides a well-written first course in probability and statistics...It is a book that has been written based on the long teaching experience of the authors and I would certainly recommend it for university coursework." Short Book Reviews of the International Statistical Institute, December 2005 "This book has numerous quick exercises to give direct feedback to the students. ... A website at www.springeronline.com/978-1-85233-896-1 gives access to the data files used in the text ... . This will be a key text for undergraduates in computer science, physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology and business studies who are studying a mathematical statistics course, and also for more intensive engineering statistics courses for undergraduates in all engineering subjects." (Rainer Beedgen, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1079, 2006) "The book is designed for a one-semester introductory course in probability and statistics basics for engineering students. ... It can also be used by students in other more mathematically oriented majors such as applied mathematics with more emphasis on the mathematics and additional coverage in topics such as combinatorics, conditional expectation, and generating functions. ... More elaborate exercises and real datasets are given at the end of each chapter." (Arthur B. Yeh, Technometrics, Vol. 49 (3), August, 2007)

• Why probability and statistics?.- Outcomes, events, and probability.- Conditional probability and independence.- Discrete random variables.- Continuous random variables.- Simulation.- Expectation and variance.- Computations with random variables.- Joint distributions and independence.- Covariance and correlation.- More computations with more random variables.- The Poisson process.- The law of large numbers.- The central limit theorem.- Exploratory data analysis: graphical summaries.- Exploratory data analysis: numerical summaries.- Basic statistical models.- The bootstrap.- Unbiased estimators.- Efficiency and mean squared error.- Maximum likelihood.- The method of least squares.- Confidence intervals for the mean.- More on confidence intervals.- Testing hypotheses: essentials.- Testing hypotheses: elaboration.- The t-test.- Comparing two samples.