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.

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 Handbook is intended as a desk reference for researchers, students and engineers working in various areas of solid mechanics and quantitative materials science. It contains a broad range of elasticity solutions. In particular, it covers the following topics: -Basic equations in various coordinate systems, -Green's functions for isotropic and anisotropic solids, -Cracks in two- and three-dimensional solids, -Eshelby's problems and related results, -Stress concentrations at inhomogeneities, -Contact problems, -Thermoelasticity. The solutions have been collected from a large number of monographs and research articles. Some of the presented results were obtained only recently and are not easily available. All solutions have been thoroughly checked and transformed to a userfriendly form.

A decade after the publication of Contemporary Mathematics Vol. 287, the present volume demonstrates the consolidation of important areas, such as algebraic statistics, computational commutative algebra, and deeper aspects of graphical models. --

This book presents the proceedings of a conference on dynamical systems held in honor of Jürgen Scheurle in January 2012. Through both original research papers and survey articles leading experts in the field offer overviews of the current state of the theory and its applications to mechanics and physics. In particular, the following aspects of the theory of dynamical systems are covered: - Stability and bifurcation - Geometric mechanics and control theory - Invariant manifolds, attractors and chaos - Fluid mechanics and elasticity - Perturbations and multiscale problems - Hamiltonian dynamics and KAM theory Researchers and graduate students in dynamical systems and related fields, including engineering, will benefit from the articles presented in this volume.

The first systematic presentation of the theory of dynamical systems under the influence of randomness, this book includes products of random mappings as well as random and stochastic differential equations. The basic multiplicative ergodic theorem is presented, providing a random substitute for linear algebra. On its basis, many applications are detailed. Numerous instructive examples are treated analytically or numerically.

This volume contains the proceedings of the International Research Conference “Probability on Algebraic and Geometric Structures”, held from June 5–7, 2014, at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL, celebrating the careers of Philip Feinsilver, Salah-Eldin A. Mohammed, and Arunava Mukherjea. These proceedings include survey papers and new research on a variety of topics such as probability measures and the behavior of stochastic processes on groups, semigroups, and Clifford algebras; algebraic methods for analyzing Markov chains and products of random matrices; stochastic integrals and stochastic ordinary, partial, and functional differential equations.