This very well written and accessible book emphasizes the reasons for studying measure theory, which is the foundation of much of probability. By focusing on measure, many illustrative examples and applications, including a thorough discussion of standard probability distributions and densities, are opened. The book also includes many problems and their fully worked solutions.

Marek Capiński; P E Kopp

Springer London : Imprint: Springer

Springer London, Limited

Springer Nature

Springer undergraduate mathematics series, London, 1999

United Kingdom and Ireland, United Kingdom

1, 20130629

The central concepts in this book are Lebesgue measure and the Lebesgue integral. Their role as standard fare in UK undergraduate mathematics courses is not wholly secure; yet they provide the principal model for the development of the abstract measure spaces which underpin modern probability theory, while the Lebesgue function spaces remain the main sour ce of examples on which to test the methods of functional analysis and its many applications, such as Fourier analysis and the theory of partial differential equations. It follows that not only budding analysts have need of a clear understanding of the construction and properties of measures and integrals, but also that those who wish to contribute seriously to the applications of analytical methods in a wide variety of areas of mathematics, physics, electronics, engineering and, most recently, finance, need to study the underlying theory with some care. We have found remarkably few texts in the current literature which aim explicitly to provide for these needs, at a level accessible to current under­ graduates. There are many good books on modern prob ability theory, and increasingly they recognize the need for a strong grounding in the tools we develop in this book, but all too often the treatment is either too advanced for an undergraduate audience or else somewhat perfunctory.

The key concept is that of measure which is first developed on the real line and then presented abstractly to provide an introduction to the foundations of probability theory (the Kolmogorov axioms) which in turn opens a route to many illustrative examples and applications, including a thorough discussion of standard probability distributions and densities. Throughout, the development of the Lebesgue Integral provides the essential ideas: the role of basic convergence theorems, a discussion of modes of convergence for measurable functions, relations to the Riemann integral and the fundamental theorem of calculus, leading to the definition of Lebesgue spaces, the Fubini and Radon-Nikodym Theorems and their roles in describing the properties of random variables and their distributions. Applications to probability include laws of large numbers and the central limit theorem

2021-03-29