This volume contains lectures given at the Saint-Flour Summer School of Probability Theory during the period 8th-24th July, 1999. We thank the authors for all the hard work they accomplished. Their lectures are a work of reference in their domain. The School brought together 85 participants, 31 of whom gave a lecture concerning their research work. At the end of this volume you will find the list of participants and their papers. Finally, to facilitate research concerning previous schools we give here the number of the volume of "Lecture Notes" where they can be found: Lecture Notes in Mathematics 1975: n ° 539- 1971: n ° 307- 1973: n ° 390- 1974: n ° 480- 1979: n ° 876- 1976: n ° 598- 1977: n ° 678- 1978: n ° 774- 1980: n ° 929- 1981: n ° 976- 1982: n ° 1097- 1983: n ° 1117- 1988: n ° 1427- 1984: n ° 1180- 1985-1986 et 1987: n ° 1362- 1989: n ° 1464- 1990: n ° 1527- 1991: n ° 1541- 1992: n ° 1581- 1993: n ° 1608- 1994: n ° 1648- 1995: n ° 1690- 1996: n ° 1665- 1997: n ° 1717- 1998: n ° 1738- Lecture Notes in Statistics 1971: n ° 307- Table of Contents Part I Erwin Bolthausen: Large Deviations and Interacting Random Walks 1 On the construction of the three-dimensional polymer measure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 2 Self-attracting random walks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 3 One-dimensional pinning-depinning transitions. . . . . . . . . . . 105 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

This volume contains lectures given at the 31st Probability Summer School in Saint-Flour (July 8-25, 2001). Simon Tavaré’s lectures serve as an introduction to the coalescent, and to inference for ancestral processes in population genetics. The stochastic computation methods described include rejection methods, importance sampling, Markov chain Monte Carlo, and approximate Bayesian methods. Ofer Zeitouni’s course on "Random Walks in Random Environment" presents systematically the tools that have been introduced to study the model. A fairly complete description of available results in dimension 1 is given. For higher dimension, the basic techniques and a discussion of some of the available results are provided. The contribution also includes an updated annotated bibliography and suggestions for further reading. Olivier Catoni's course appears separately.

The book is a collection of 80 short and self-contained lectures covering most of the topics that are usually taught in intermediate courses in probability theory and mathematical statistics. There are hundreds of examples, solved exercises and detailed derivations of important results. The step-by-step approach makes the book easy to understand and ideal for self-study. One of the main aims of the book is to be a time saver: it contains several results and proofs, especially on probability distributions, that are hard to find in standard references and are scattered here and there in more specialistic books. The topics covered by the book are as follows. PART 1 - MATHEMATICAL TOOLS: set theory, permutations, combinations, partitions, sequences and limits, review of differentiation and integration rules, the Gamma and Beta functions. PART 2 - FUNDAMENTALS OF PROBABILITY: events, probability, independence, conditional probability, Bayes' rule, random variables and random vectors, expected value, variance, covariance, correlation, covariance matrix, conditional distributions and conditional expectation, independent variables, indicator functions. PART 3 - ADDITIONAL TOPICS IN PROBABILITY THEORY: probabilistic inequalities, construction of probability distributions, transformations of probability distributions, moments and cross-moments, moment generating functions, characteristic functions. PART 4 - PROBABILITY DISTRIBUTIONS: Bernoulli, binomial, Poisson, uniform, exponential, normal, Chi-square, Gamma, Student's t, F, multinomial, multivariate normal, multivariate Student's t, Wishart. PART 5 - MORE DETAILS ABOUT THE NORMAL DISTRIBUTION: linear combinations, quadratic forms, partitions. PART 6 - ASYMPTOTIC THEORY: sequences of random vectors and random variables, pointwise convergence, almost sure convergence, convergence in probability, mean-square convergence, convergence in distribution, relations between modes of convergence, Laws of Large Numbers, Central Limit Theorems, Continuous Mapping Theorem, Slutsky's Theorem. PART 7 - FUNDAMENTALS OF STATISTICS: statistical inference, point estimation, set estimation, hypothesis testing, statistical inferences about the mean, statistical inferences about the variance.

Probability theory

Developed from celebrated Harvard statistics lectures, Introduction to Probability provides essential language and tools for understanding statistics, randomness, and uncertainty. The book explores a wide variety of applications and examples, ranging from coincidences and paradoxes to Google PageRank and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). Additional application areas explored include genetics, medicine, computer science, and information theory. The print book version includes a code that provides free access to an eBook version. The authors present the material in an accessible style and motivate concepts using real-world examples. Throughout, they use stories to uncover connections between the fundamental distributions in statistics and conditioning to reduce complicated problems to manageable pieces. The book includes many intuitive explanations, diagrams, and practice problems. Each chapter ends with a section showing how to perform relevant simulations and calculations in R, a free statistical software environment.

Sinai's book leads the student through the standard material for ProbabilityTheory, with stops along the way for interesting topics such as statistical mechanics, not usually included in a book for beginners. The first part of the book covers discrete random variables, using the same approach, basedon Kolmogorov's axioms for probability, used later for the general case. The text is divided into sixteen lectures, each covering a major topic. The introductory notions and classical results are included, of course: random variables, the central limit theorem, the law of large numbers, conditional probability, random walks, etc. Sinai's style is accessible and clear, with interesting examples to accompany new ideas. Besides statistical mechanics, other interesting, less common topics found in the book are: percolation, the concept of stability in the central limit theorem and the study of probability of large deviations. Little more than a standard undergraduate course in analysis is assumed of the reader. Notions from measure theory and Lebesgue integration are introduced in the second half of the text. The book is suitable for second or third year students in mathematics, physics or other natural sciences. It could also be usedby more advanced readers who want to learn the mathematics of probability theory and some of its applications in statistical physics.