Papers in Honour of Octav Onicescu on his 90th Birthday: Studies in Probability and Related Topics

Edtrice Nagard, 1913-01-01. Hardcover. Very Good. 1983 first edition Editrice Nagard (Rome, Italy), 7 x 9 3/4 inches tall hardbound in publisher's unclipped dust jacket, tan paper-covered boards, gilt lettering to spine, 479 pp. Slight bumping to upper edge of boards. Cornell University bookstore sticker to front free-endpaper. Otherwise, a very good to near fine copy - clean, bright and unmarked - in a slightly soiled and edgeworn dust jacket (nicely preserved in a clear archival sleeve). A scarce compilation of more than forty papers - most in English - relating to probability, dedicated to Octav Onicescu (1892-1983), a Romanian mathematician and founder of the Romanian school of probability theory and statistics. Note that this is a heavy and oversized book, so additional postage will be required for international or priority orders. ~SP09B~ Probability theory is the branch of mathematics concerned with the analysis of random phenomena. The central objects of probability theory are random variables, stochastic processes and events: mathematical abstractions of non-deterministic events or measured quantities that may either be single occurrences or evolve over time in an apparently random fashion. If an individual coin toss or the roll of dice is considered to be a random event, then if repeated many times the sequence of random events will exhibit certain patterns, which can be studied and predicted. As a mathematical foundation for statistics, probability theory is essential to many human activities that involve quantitative analysis of large sets of data. Methods of probability theory also apply to descriptions of complex systems given only partial knowledge of their state, as in statistical mechanics. A great discovery of twentieth century physics was the probabilistic nature of physical phenomena at atomic scales, described in quantum mechanics.