David Applebaum

A quantity can be made smaller and smaller without it ever vanishing. This fact has profound consequences for science, technology, and even the way we think about numbers. This book explores this idea by moving at an easy pace through an account of elementary real analysis and, in particular, focuses on numbers, sequences, and series.

Lévy processes form a wide and rich class of random process, and have many applications ranging from physics to finance. Stochastic calculus is the mathematics of systems interacting with random noise. For the first time in a book, Applebaum ties the two subjects together. He begins with an introduction to the general theory of Lévy processes. The second part develops the stochastic calculus for Lévy processes in a direct and accessible way. En route, the reader is introduced to important concepts in modern probability theory, such as martingales, semimartingales, Markov and Feller processes, semigroups and generators, and the theory of Dirichlet forms. There is a careful development of stochastic integrals and stochastic differential equations driven by Lévy processes. The book introduces all the tools that are needed for the stochastic approach to option pricing, including Itô's formula, Girsanov's theorem and the martingale representation theorem.

Lectures given at the school "Quantum Independent Increment Processes: Structure and Applications to Physics" held at the Alfried-Krupp-Wissenschaftskolleg in Greifswald in March 9-22, 2003.

Update of this popular introduction to probability theory and information theory with new material on Markov chains.