Probability Theory I

Intended as a self-contained introduction to measure theory, this textbook also includes a comprehensive treatment of integration on locally compact Hausdorff spaces, the analytic and Borel subsets of Polish spaces, and Haar measures on locally compact groups. This second edition includes a chapter on measure-theoretic probability theory, plus brief treatments of the Banach-Tarski paradox, the Henstock-Kurzweil integral, the Daniell integral, and the existence of liftings.

This first text on the subject provides a comprehensive introduction to the representation theory of finite monoids. Carefully worked examples and exercises provide the bells and whistles for graduate accessibility, bringing a broad range of advanced readers to the forefront of research in the area. Highlights of the text include applications to probability theory, symbolic dynamics, and automata theory.

This monograph offers a new foundation for information theory that is based on the notion of information-as-distinctions, being directly measured by logical entropy, and on the re-quantification as Shannon entropy, which is the fundamental concept for the theory of coding and communications.

In the Preface to the first edition, originally published in 1980, we mentioned that this book was based on the author's lectures in the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics of the Lomonosov University in Moscow, which were issued, in part, in mimeographed form under the title "Probabil­ ity, Statistics, and Stochastic Processors, I, II" and published by that Univer­ sity. Our original intention in writing the first edition of this book was to divide the contents into three parts: probability, mathematical statistics, and theory of stochastic processes, which corresponds to an outline of a three­ semester course of lectures for university students of mathematics. However, in the course of preparing the book, it turned out to be impossible to realize this intention completely, since a full exposition would have required too much space.

The ideas of probability are all around us. Lotteries, casino gambling, the al­ most non-stop polling which seems to mold public policy more and more­ these are a few of the areas where principles of probability impinge in a direct way on the lives and fortunes of the general public. At a more re­ moved level there is modern science which uses probability and its offshoots like statistics and the theory of random processes to build mathematical descriptions of the real world. In fact, twentieth-century physics, in embrac­ ing quantum mechanics, has a world view that is at its core probabilistic in nature, contrary to the deterministic one of classical physics.