In this book, the functional inequalities are introduced to describe:(i) the spectrum of the generator: the essential and discrete spectrums, high order eigenvalues, the principle eigenvalue, and the spectral gap;(ii) the semigroup properties: the uniform intergrability, the compactness, the convergence rate, and the existence of density;(iii) the reference measure and the intrinsic metric: the concentration, the isoperimetic inequality, and the transportation cost inequality.

The 33rd Bernoulli Society Conference on Stochastic Processes and Their Applications was held in Berlin from July 27 to July 31, 2009. It brought together more than 600 researchers from 49 countries to discuss recent progress in the mathematical research related to stochastic processes, with applications ranging from biology to statistical mechanics, finance and climatology. This book collects survey articles highlighting new trends and focal points in the area written by plenary speakers of the conference, all of them outstanding international experts. A particular aim of this collection is to inspire young scientists to pursue research goals in the wide range of fields represented in this volume.

Stochastic analysis on Riemannian manifolds without boundary has been well established. However, the analysis for reflecting diffusion processes and sub-elliptic diffusion processes is far from complete. This book contains recent advances in this direction along with new ideas and efficient arguments, which are crucial for further developments. Many results contained here (for example, the formula of the curvature using derivatives of the semigroup) are new among existing monographs even in the case without boundary.

The second edition of this book has a new title that more accurately reflects the table of contents. Over the past few years, many new results have been proven in the field of partial differential equations. This edition takes those new results into account, in particular the study of nonautonomous operators with unbounded coefficients, which has received great attention. Additionally, this edition is the first to use a unified approach to contain the new results in a singular place.

This book contains original research papers by leading experts in the fields of probability theory, stochastic analysis, potential theory and mathematical physics. There is also a historical account on Masatoshi Fukushima's contribution to mathematics, as well as authoritative surveys on the state of the art in the field.

​In this book the author presents a self-contained account of Harnack inequalities and applications for the semigroup of solutions to stochastic partial and delayed differential equations. Since the semigroup refers to Fokker-Planck equations on infinite-dimensional spaces, the Harnack inequalities the author investigates are dimension-free. This is an essentially different point from the above mentioned classical Harnack inequalities. Moreover, the main tool in the study is a new coupling method (called coupling by change of measures) rather than the usual maximum principle in the current literature.