Michel Talagrand - Böcker

Quantum field theory (QFT) is one of the great achievements of physics, of profound interest to mathematicians. Most pedagogical texts on QFT are geared toward budding professional physicists, however, whereas mathematical accounts are abstract and difficult to relate to the physics. This book bridges the gap. While the treatment is rigorous whenever possible, the accent is not on formality but on explaining what the physicists do and why, using precise mathematical language. In particular, it covers in detail the mysterious procedure of renormalization. Written for readers with a mathematical background but no previous knowledge of physics and largely self-contained, it presents both basic physical ideas from special relativity and quantum mechanics and advanced mathematical concepts in complete detail. It will be of interest to mathematicians wanting to learn about QFT and, with nearly 300 exercises, also to physics students seeking greater rigor than they typically find in their courses. Erratum for the book can be found at michel.talagrand.net/erratum.pdf.

This book provides an in-depth account of modern methods used to bound the supremum of stochastic processes. Starting from first principles, it takes the reader to the frontier of current research. This second edition has been completely rewritten, offering substantial improvements to the exposition and simplified proofs, as well as new results.The book starts with a thorough account of the generic chaining, a remarkably simple and powerful method to bound a stochastic process that should belong to every probabilist’s toolkit. The effectiveness of the scheme is demonstrated by the characterization of sample boundedness of Gaussian processes. Much of the book is devoted to exploring the wealth of ideas and results generated by thirty years of efforts to extend this result to more general classes of processes, culminating in the recent solution of several key conjectures.A large part of this unique book is devoted to the author’s influential work.While many of the results presented are rather advanced, others bear on the very foundations of probability theory. In addition to providing an invaluable reference for researchers, the book should therefore also be of interest to a wide range of readers.

In the eighties, a group of theoretical physicists introduced several models for certain disordered systems, called "spin glasses". These models are simple and rather canonical random structures, that physicists studied by non-rigorous methods. They predicted spectacular behaviors, previously unknown in probability theory. They believe these behaviors occur in many models of considerable interest for several branches of science (statistical physics, neural networks and computer science). This book introduces in a rigorous manner this exciting new area to the mathematically minded reader. It requires no knowledge whatsoever of any physics, and contains proofs in complete detail of much of what is rigorously known on spin glasses at the time of writing.

The fundamental question of characterizing continuity and boundedness of Gaussian processes goes back to Kolmogorov. After essential contributions by R. Dudley and X. Fernique, it was solved by the author in 1985. This advance was followed by a great improvement of our understanding of the boundedness of other fundamental classes of processes (empirical processes, infinitely divisible processes, etc.) This challenging body of work has now been considerably simplified through the notion of "generic chaining", a completely natural variation on the ideas of Kolmogorov. The entirely new presentation adopted here takes the reader from the first principles to the edge of current knowledge, and to the wonderful open problems that remain in this domain.

In the eighties, a group of theoretical physicists introduced several models for certain disordered systems, called "spin glasses". These models are simple and rather canonical random structures, that physicists studied by non-rigorous methods. They predicted spectacular behaviors, previously unknown in probability theory. They believe these behaviors occur in many models of considerable interest for several branches of science (statistical physics, neural networks and computer science). This book introduces in a rigorous manner this exciting new area to the mathematically minded reader. It requires no knowledge whatsoever of any physics, and contains proofs in complete detail of much of what is rigorously known on spin glasses at the time of writing.

Author's Note: The material of this book has been reworked and expanded with a lot more detail and published in the author's 2014 book "Upper and Lower Bounds for Stochastic Processes" (Ergebnisse Vol. 60, ISBN 978-3-642-54074-5). That book is much easier to read and covers everything that is in "The Generic Chaining" book in a more detailed and comprehensible way.   ************What is the maximum level a certain river is likely to reach over the next 25 years? (Having experienced three times a few feet of water in my house, I feel a keen personal interest in this question. ) There are many questions of the same nature: what is the likely magnitude of the strongest earthquake to occur during the life of a planned building, or the speed of the strongest wind a suspension bridge will have to stand? All these situations can be modeled in the same manner. The value X of the quantity of interest (be it water t level or speed of wind) at time t is a random variable. What can be said about the maximum value of X over a certain range of t? t A collection of random variables (X ), where t belongs to a certain index t set T, is called a stochastic process, and the topic of this book is the study of the supremum of certain stochastic processes, and more precisely to ?nd upper and lower bounds for the quantity EsupX . (0. 1) t t?T Since T might be uncountable, some care has to be taken to de?ne this quantity. For any reasonable de?nition of Esup X we have t t?T EsupX =sup{EsupX ; F?T,F ?nite} , (0. 2) t t t?T t?F an equality that we will take as the de?nition of the quantity Esup X . t t?T Thus, the crucial case for the estimation of the quantity (0.

This is a new, completely revised, updated and enlarged edition of the author's Ergebnisse vol. 46: "Spin Glasses: A Challenge for Mathematicians". This new edition will appear in two volumes, the present first volume presents the basic results and methods, the second volume is expected to appear in 2011. In the eighties, a group of theoretical physicists introduced several models for certain disordered systems, called "spin glasses". These models are simple and rather canonical random structures, of considerable interest for several branches of science (statistical physics, neural networks and computer science). The physicists studied them by non-rigorous methods and predicted spectacular behaviors. This book introduces in a rigorous manner this exciting new area to the mathematically minded reader. It requires no knowledge whatsoever of any physics. The first volume of this new and completely rewritten edition presents six fundamental models and the basic techniques to study them.

Isoperimetric, measure concentration and random process techniques appear at the basis of the modern understanding of Probability in Banach spaces. Based on these tools, the book presents a complete treatment of the main aspects of Probability in Banach spaces (integrability and limit theorems for vector valued random variables, boundedness and continuity of random processes) and of some of their links to Geometry of Banach spaces (via the type and cotype properties). Its purpose is to present some of the main aspects of this theory, from the foundations to the most important achievements. The main features of the investigation are the systematic use of isoperimetry and concentration of measure and abstract random process techniques (entropy and majorizing measures). Examples of these probabilistic tools and ideas to classical Banach space theory are further developed.

This is a new, completely revised, updated and enlarged edition of the author's Ergebnisse vol. 46: "Spin Glasses: A Challenge for Mathematicians" in two volumes (this is the 2nd volume). In the eighties, a group of theoretical physicists introduced several models for certain disordered systems, called "spin glasses". These models are simple and rather canonical random structures, of considerable interest for several branches of science (statistical physics, neural networks and computer science). The physicists studied them by non-rigorous methods and predicted spectacular behaviors. This book introduces in a rigorous manner this exciting new area to the mathematically minded reader. It requires no knowledge whatsoever of any physics. The present Volume II contains a considerable amount of new material, in particular all the fundamental low-temperature results obtained after the publication of the first edition.

This is a new, completely revised, updated and enlarged edition of the author's Ergebnisse vol. 46: "Spin Glasses: A Challenge for Mathematicians". This new edition will appear in two volumes, the present first volume presents the basic results and methods, the second volume is expected to appear in 2011. In the eighties, a group of theoretical physicists introduced several models for certain disordered systems, called "spin glasses". These models are simple and rather canonical random structures, of considerable interest for several branches of science (statistical physics, neural networks and computer science). The physicists studied them by non-rigorous methods and predicted spectacular behaviors. This book introduces in a rigorous manner this exciting new area to the mathematically minded reader. It requires no knowledge whatsoever of any physics. The first volume of this new and completely rewritten edition presents six fundamental models and the basic techniques to study them.

This is a new, completely revised, updated and enlarged edition of the author's Ergebnisse vol. 46: "Spin Glasses: A Challenge for Mathematicians" in two volumes (this is the 2nd volume). In the eighties, a group of theoretical physicists introduced several models for certain disordered systems, called "spin glasses". These models are simple and rather canonical random structures, of considerable interest for several branches of science (statistical physics, neural networks and computer science). The physicists studied them by non-rigorous methods and predicted spectacular behaviors. This book introduces in a rigorous manner this exciting new area to the mathematically minded reader. It requires no knowledge whatsoever of any physics. The present Volume II contains a considerable amount of new material, in particular all the fundamental low-temperature results obtained after the publication of the first edition.