Pierre Picco - Böcker

This book contains the lectures given at the NATO ASI 910820 "Cellular Automata and Cooperative Systems" Meeting which was held at the Centre de Physique des Houches, France, from June 22 to July 2, 1992. This workshop brought together mathematical physicists, theoretical physicists and mathe- maticians working in fields related to local interacting systems, cellular and probabilistic automata, statistical physics, and complexity theory, as well as applications of these fields. We would like to thank our sponsors and supporters whose interest and help was essential for the success of the meeting: the NATO Scientific Affairs Division, the DRET (Direction des Recherches, Etudes et Techniques), the Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres, the National Science Foundation. We would also like to thank all the secretaries who helped us during the preparation of the meeting, in particular Maryse Cohen-Solal (CPT, Marseille) and Janice Nowinski (Courant Institute, New York). We are grateful for the fine work of Mrs. Gladys Cavallone in preparing this volume.

Aimed at graduates and potential researchers, this is a comprehensive introduction to the mathematical aspects of spin glasses and neural networks. It should be useful to mathematicians in probability theory and theoretical physics, and to engineers working in theoretical computer science.

This volume is based on lectures notes for the courses delivered at the Cimpa Summer School: From Classical to Modern Probability, held at Temuco, Chile, be­ th th tween January 8 and 26 , 2001. This meeting brought together probabilists and graduate students interested in fields like particle systems, percolation, Brownian motion, random structures, potential theory and stochastic processes. We would like to express our gratitude to all the participants of the school as well as the people who contributed to its organization. In particular, to Servet Martinez, and Pablo Ferrari for their scientific advice, and Cesar Burgueiio for all his support and friendship. We want to thank all the professors for their stimulating courses and lectures. Special thanks to those who took the extra work in preparing each chapter of this book. We are also indebted to our sponsors and supporting institutions, whose interest and help was essential to organize this meeting: CIMPA, CNRS, CONI­ CYT, ECOS, FONDAP Program in Applied Mathematics, French Cooperation, Fundacion Andes, Presidential Fellowship, Universidad de Chile and Universidad de La Frontera. We are grateful to Miss Gladys Cavallone for her excellent work during the preparation of the meeting as well as for the considerable task of unifying the typography of the different chapters of this book.

This volume is based on the lecture notes of six courses delivered at a CIMPA Summer School in Temuco, Chile, in January 2001. The courses are: asymptotic of the heat kernel in unbounded domains; spin systems with long range interactions; non-linear Dirichlet problem and non-linear integration; first-passage percolation; central limit theorem for Markov processes; stochastic orders and stopping times in Brownian motion. The level of each course is that of a graduate course, but the material will also be of interest for the specialist.