Principles of Mathematical Geology

This volume, which is based on the Russian edition published in 1980, presents the fundamentals of mathematical geology. New developments which have taken place in the last ten years or so have been taken into account as far as possible, and this English edition contains two completely new chapters devoted, respectively, to random diffusion processes and a survey of future geological problems.

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.