J. Michael Steele – författare

This lively, problem-oriented text, first published in 2004, is designed to coach readers toward mastery of the most fundamental mathematical inequalities. With the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality as the initial guide, the reader is led through a sequence of fascinating problems whose solutions are presented as they might have been discovered - either by one of history's famous mathematicians or by the reader. The problems emphasize beauty and surprise, but along the way readers will find systematic coverage of the geometry of squares, convexity, the ladder of power means, majorization, Schur convexity, exponential sums, and the inequalities of Hölder, Hilbert, and Hardy. The text is accessible to anyone who knows calculus and who cares about solving problems. It is well suited to self-study, directed study, or as a supplement to courses in analysis, probability, and combinatorics.

Discrete probability theory and the theory of algorithms have become close partners over the last ten years, though the roots of this partnership go back much longer. The papers in this volume address the latest developments in this active field. They are from the IMA Workshops "Probability and Algorithms" and "The Finite Markov Chain Renaissance." They represent the current thinking of many of the world's leading experts in the field.Researchers and graduate students in probability, computer science, combinatorics, and optimization theory will all be interested in this collection of articles. The techniques developed and surveyed in this volume are still undergoing rapid development, and many of the articles of the collection offer an expositionally pleasant entree into a research area of growing importance.

This monograph provides an introduction to the state of the art of the probability theory that is most directly applicable to combinatorial optimization. Much attention is paid to those questions dealing with discrete optimization problems for points in Euclidean space, such as the minimum spanning tree, the traveling-salesman tour, and minimal-length matchings. Still, there are several nongeometric optimization problems that receive full treatment, and these include the problems of the longest common subsequence and the longest increasing subsequence. The philosophy that guides the exposition is that analysis of concrete problems is the most effective way to explain even the most general methods or abstract principles.There are three fundamental probabilistic themes that are examined through our concrete investigations. First, there is a systematic exploitation of martingales. Over the last ten years, many investigators of problems of combinatorial optimization have come to count on martingale inequalities as versatile tools which let us show that many of the naturally occurring random variables of combinatorial optimization are sharply concentrated about their means - a phenomenon with numerous practical and theoretical consequences.The second theme that is explored is the systematic use of subadditivity of several flavors, ranging from the naïve subadditivity of real sequences to the subtler subadditivity of stochastic processes. By and large, subadditivity offers only elementary tools, but on remarkably many occasions such tools provide the key organizing principle in the attack on problems of nearly intractable difficulty.The third and deepest theme developed here concerns the application of Talagrand's isoperimetric theory of concentration inequalities. This new theory is reshaping almost everything that is known in the probability theory of combinatorial optimization. The treatment given here deals with only a small part of Talagrand's theory, but the reader will find considerable coaching on how to use some of the most important ideas from that theory.

This book is designed for students who want to develop professional skill in stochastic calculus and its application to problems in finance. The Wharton School course that forms the basis for this book is designed for energetic students who have had some experience with probability and statistics but have not had ad­ vanced courses in stochastic processes. Although the course assumes only a modest background, it moves quickly, and in the end, students can expect to have tools that are deep enough and rich enough to be relied on throughout their professional careers. The course begins with simple random walk and the analysis of gambling games. This material is used to motivate the theory of martingales, and, after reaching a decent level of confidence with discrete processes, the course takes up the more de­ manding development of continuous-time stochastic processes, especially Brownian motion. The construction of Brownian motion is given in detail, and enough mate­ rial on the subtle nature of Brownian paths is developed for the student to evolve a good sense of when intuition can be trusted and when it cannot. The course then takes up the Ito integral in earnest. The development of stochastic integration aims to be careful and complete without being pedantic.

Discrete probability theory and the theory of algorithms have become close partners over the last ten years, though the roots of this partnership go back much longer. The papers in this volume address the latest developments in this active field. They are from the IMA Workshops "Probability and Algorithms" and "The Finite Markov Chain Renaissance." They represent the current thinking of many of the world's leading experts in the field.Researchers and graduate students in probability, computer science, combinatorics, and optimization theory will all be interested in this collection of articles. The techniques developed and surveyed in this volume are still undergoing rapid development, and many of the articles of the collection offer an expositionally pleasant entree into a research area of growing importance.