This volume of the Encyclopaedia is a survey of stochastic calculus, an increasingly important part of probability, authored by well-known experts in the field. The book addresses graduate students and researchers in probability theory and mathematical statistics, as well as physicists and engineers who need to apply stochastic methods.

This volume of the Encyclopaedia is a survey of stochastic calculus, an increasingly important part of probability, authored by well-known experts in the field. The book addresses graduate students and researchers in probability theory and mathematical statistics, as well as physicists and engineers who need to apply stochastic methods.

Aimed primarily at graduate students and researchers, this text is a comprehensive course in modern probability theory and its measure-theoretical foundations. It covers a wide variety of topics, many of which are not usually found in introductory textbooks. The theory is developed rigorously and in a self-contained way, with the chapters on measure theory interlaced with the probabilistic chapters in order to display the power of the abstract concepts in the world of probability theory. In addition, plenty of figures, computer simulations, biographic details of key mathematicians, and a wealth of examples support and enliven the presentation.

Following its 1963 publication, this volume served as the standard advanced text in probability theory. Suitable for undergraduate and graduate students, the treatment includes extensive introductory material.

This book contains about 500 exercises consisting mostly of special cases and examples, second thoughts and alternative arguments, natural extensions, and some novel departures. With a few obvious exceptions they are neither profound nor trivial, and hints and comments are appended to many of them. If they tend to be somewhat inbred, at least they are relevant to the text and should help in its digestion. As a bold venture I have marked a few of them with a * to indicate a "must", although no rigid standard of selection has been used. Some of these are needed in the book, but in any case the reader's study of the text will be more complete after he has tried at least those problems.

This book is intended as a text for graduate students and as a reference for workers in probability and statistics. The prerequisite is honest calculus. The material covered in Parts Two to Five inclusive requires about three to four semesters of graduate study. The introductory part may serve as a text for an undergraduate course in elementary probability theory. Numerous historical marks about results, methods, and the evolution of various fields are an intrinsic part of the text. About a third of the second volume is devoted to conditioning and properties of sequences of various types of dependence. The other two thirds are devoted to random functions; the last Part on Elements of random analysis is more sophisticated.

Probability theory