A Scientific American article on chaos, see Crutchfield et al. (1986), illus trates a very persuasive example of recurrence. A painting of Henri Poincare, or rather a digitized version of it, is stretched and cut to produce a mildly distorted image of Poincare. The same procedure is applied to the distorted image and the process is repeated over and over again on the successively more and more blurred images. After a dozen repetitions nothing seems to be left of the original portrait. Miraculously, structured images appear briefly as we continue to apply the distortion procedure to successive images. After 241 iterations the original picture reappears, unchanged! Apparently the pixels of the Poincare portrait were moving about in accor dance with a strictly deterministic rule. More importantly, the set of all pixels, the whole portrait, was transformed by the distortion mechanism. In this exam ple the transformation seems to have been a reversible one since the original was faithfully recreated. It is not very farfetched to introduce a certain amount of randomness and irreversibility in the above example. Think of a random miscoloring of some pixels or of inadvertently giving a pixel the color of its neighbor. The methods in this book are geared towards being applicable to the asymp totics of such transformation processes. The transformations form a semigroup in a natural way; we want to investigate the long-term behavior of random elements of this semigroup.

This second edition presents up-to-date material on the theory of weak convergance of convolution products of probability measures in semigroups, the theory of random walks on semigroups, and their applications to products of random matrices. In addition, this unique work examines the essentials of abstract semigroup theory and its application to concrete semigroups of matrices. This substantially revised text includes exercises at various levels at the end of each section and includes the best available proofs on the most important theorems used in a book, making it suitable for a one semester course on semigroups. In addition, it could also be used as a main text or supplementary material for courses focusing on probability on algebraic structures or weak convergance. This book is ideally suited to graduate students in mathematics, and students in other fields, such as engineering and the sciences with an interest in probability. Students in statistics using advanced probability will also find this book useful.

The aim of the series is to present new and important developments in pure and applied mathematics. Well established in the community over two decades, it offers a large library of mathematics including several important classics. The volumes supply thorough and detailed expositions of the methods and ideas essential to the topics in question. In addition, they convey their relationships to other parts of mathematics. The series is addressed to advanced readers wishing to thoroughly study the topic. Editorial Board Lev Birbrair, Universidade Federal do Ceará, Fortaleza, Brasil Walter D. Neumann, Columbia University, New York, USA Markus J. Pflaum, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA Dierk Schleicher, Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany Katrin Wendland, University of Freiburg, Germany Honorary Editor Victor P. Maslov, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia Titles in planning include Yuri A. Bahturin, Identical Relations in Lie Algebras (2019) Yakov G. Berkovich and Z. Janko, Groups of Prime Power Order, Volume 6 (2019) Yakov G. Berkovich, Lev G. Kazarin, and Emmanuel M. Zhmud', Characters of Finite Groups, Volume 2 (2019) Jorge Herbert Soares de Lira, Variational Problems for Hypersurfaces in Riemannian Manifolds (2019) Volker Mayer, Mariusz Urbański, and Anna Zdunik, Random and Conformal Dynamical Systems (2021) Ioannis Diamantis, Boštjan Gabrovšek, Sofia Lambropoulou, and Maciej Mroczkowski, Knot Theory of Lens Spaces (2021)

This volume in the series contains chapters on areas such as pareto processes, branching processes, inference in stochastic processes, Poisson approximation, Levy processes, and iterated random maps and some classes of Markov processes. Other chapters cover random walk and fluctuation theory, a semigroup representation and asymptomatic behavior of certain statistics of the Fisher-Wright-Moran coalescent, continuous-time ARMA processes, record sequence and their applications, stochastic networks with product form equilibrium, and stochastic processes in insurance and finance. Other subjects include renewal theory, stochastic processes in reliability, supports of stochastic processes of multiplicity one, Markov chains, diffusion processes, and Ito's stochastic calculus and its applications. c. Book News Inc.