Thomas G. Kurtz

This book focuses on counting processes and continuous-time Markov chains motivated by examples and applications drawn from chemical networks in systems biology. The book should serve well as a supplement for courses in probability and stochastic processes. While the material is presented in a manner most suitable for students who have studied stochastic processes up to and including martingales in continuous time, much of the necessary background material is summarized in the Appendix. Students and Researchers with a solid understanding of calculus, differential equations and elementary probability and who are well-motivated by the applications will find this book of interest.David F. Anderson is Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin and Thomas G. Kurtz is Emeritus Professor in the Departments of Mathematics and Statistics at that university. Their research is focused on probability and stochastic processes with applications in biology and other areas of science and technology.These notes are based in part on lectures given by Professor Anderson at the University of Wisconsin – Madison and by Professor Kurtz at Goethe University Frankfurt.

The Wiley-Interscience Paperback Series consists of selected books that have been made more accessible to consumers in an effort to increase global appeal and general circulation. With these new unabridged softcover volumes, Wiley hopes to extend the lives of these works by making them available to future generations of statisticians, mathematicians, and scientists. "[A]nyone who works with Markov processes whose state space is uncountably infinite will need this most impressive book as a guide and reference." -American Scientist "There is no question but that space should immediately be reserved for [this] book on the library shelf. Those who aspire to mastery of the contents should also reserve a large number of long winter evenings." -Zentralblatt für Mathematik und ihre Grenzgebiete/Mathematics Abstracts "Ethier and Kurtz have produced an excellent treatment of the modern theory of Markov processes that [is] useful both as a reference work and as a graduate textbook." -Journal of Statistical Physics Markov Processes presents several different approaches to proving weak approximation theorems for Markov processes, emphasizing the interplay of methods of characterization and approximation. Martingale problems for general Markov processes are systematically developed for the first time in book form. Useful to the professional as a reference and suitable for the graduate student as a text, this volume features a table of the interdependencies among the theorems, an extensive bibliography, and end-of-chapter problems.

The lecture courses of the CIME Summer School on Probabilistic Models for Nonlinear PDE's and their Numerical Applications (April 1995) had a three-fold emphasis: first, on the weak convergence of stochastic integrals; second, on the probabilistic interpretation and the particle approximation of equations coming from Physics (conservation laws, Boltzmann-like and Navier-Stokes equations); third, on the modelling of networks by interacting particle systems. This book, collecting the notes of these courses, will be useful to probabilists working on stochastic particle methods and on the approximation of SPDEs, in particular, to PhD students and young researchers.

Population processes are stochastic models for systems involving a number of similar particles. Examples include models for chemical reactions and for epidemics. The model may involve a finite number of attributes, or even a continuum. This monograph considers approximations that are possible when the number of particles is large. The models considered will involve a finite number of different types of particles.