Krishna B. Athreya - Böcker

This book arose out of two graduate courses that the authors have taught duringthepastseveralyears;the?rstonebeingonmeasuretheoryfollowed by the second one on advanced probability theory. The traditional approach to a ?rst course in measure theory, such as in Royden (1988), is to teach the Lebesgue measure on the real line, then the p di?erentation theorems of Lebesgue, L -spaces on R, and do general m- sure at the end of the course with one main application to the construction of product measures. This approach does have the pedagogic advantage of seeing one concrete case ?rst before going to the general one. But this also has the disadvantage in making many students’ perspective on m- sure theory somewhat narrow. It leads them to think only in terms of the Lebesgue measure on the real line and to believe that measure theory is intimately tied to the topology of the real line. As students of statistics, probability, physics, engineering, economics, and biology know very well, there are mass distributions that are typically nonuniform, and hence it is useful to gain a general perspective. This book attempts to provide that general perspective right from the beginning. The opening chapter gives an informal introduction to measure and integration theory. It shows that the notions of ?-algebra of sets and countable additivity of a set function are dictated by certain very na- ral approximation procedures from practical applications and that they are not just some abstract ideas.

This IMA Volume in Mathematics and its Applications CLASSICAL AND MODERN BRANCHING PROCESSES is based on the proceedings with the same title and was an integral part of the 1993-94 IMA program on "Emerging Applications of Probability." We would like to thank Krishna B. Athreya and Peter J agers for their hard work in organizing this meeting and in editing the proceedings. We also take this opportunity to thank the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office, and the National Security Agency, whose financial support made this workshop possible. A vner Friedman Robert Gulliver v PREFACE The IMA workshop on Classical and Modern Branching Processes was held during June 13-171994 as part of the IMA year on Emerging Appli­ cations of Probability. The organizers of the year long program identified branching processes as one of the active areas in which a workshop should be held. Krish­ na B. Athreya and Peter Jagers were asked to organize this. The topics covered by the workshop could broadly be divided into the following areas: 1. Tree structures and branching processes; 2. Branching random walks; 3. Measure valued branching processes; 4. Branching with dependence; 5. Large deviations in branching processes; 6. Classical branching processes.

The traditional approach to a ?rst course in measure theory, such as in Royden (1988), is to teach the Lebesgue measure on the real line, then the p di?erentation theorems of Lebesgue, L -spaces on R, and do general m- sure at the end of the course with one main application to the construction of product measures.

This IMA Volume in Mathematics and its Applications CLASSICAL AND MODERN BRANCHING PROCESSES is based on the proceedings with the same title and was an integral part of the 1993-94 IMA program on "Emerging Applications of Probability." We would like to thank Krishna B. Athreya and Peter J agers for their hard work in organizing this meeting and in editing the proceedings. We also take this opportunity to thank the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office, and the National Security Agency, whose financial support made this workshop possible. A vner Friedman Robert Gulliver v PREFACE The IMA workshop on Classical and Modern Branching Processes was held during June 13-171994 as part of the IMA year on Emerging Appli­ cations of Probability. The organizers of the year long program identified branching processes as one of the active areas in which a workshop should be held. Krish­ na B. Athreya and Peter Jagers were asked to organize this. The topics covered by the workshop could broadly be divided into the following areas: 1. Tree structures and branching processes; 2. Branching random walks; 3. Measure valued branching processes; 4. Branching with dependence; 5. Large deviations in branching processes; 6. Classical branching processes.