Probability on Trees and Networks

Consolidating over sixty years of research, this authoritative account of probability on networks is indispensable to anyone in the field.

Russell Lyons (Author), Yuval Peres (Author)

9781107160156, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 January 2017

720 pages, 78 b/w illus. 13 colour illus. 4 tables 864 exercises
26 x 18.4 x 4.2 cm, 1.41 kg

'This long-awaited book, a project that started in 1993, is bound to be the main reference in the fascinating field of probability on trees and weighted graphs. The authors are the leading experts behind the tremendous developments experienced in the subject in recent decades, where the underlying networks evolved from classical lattices to general graphs … This pedagogically written book is a marvelous support for several courses on topics from combinatorics, Markov chains, geometric group theory, etc., as well as on their inspiring relationships. The wealth of exercises (with comments provided at the end of the book) will enable students and researchers to check their understanding of this fascinating mathematics.' Laurent Miclo, MathSciNet

Starting around the late 1950s, several research communities began relating the geometry of graphs to stochastic processes on these graphs. This book, twenty years in the making, ties together research in the field, encompassing work on percolation, isoperimetric inequalities, eigenvalues, transition probabilities, and random walks. Written by two leading researchers, the text emphasizes intuition, while giving complete proofs and more than 850 exercises. Many recent developments, in which the authors have played a leading role, are discussed, including percolation on trees and Cayley graphs, uniform spanning forests, the mass-transport technique, and connections on random walks on graphs to embedding in Hilbert space. This state-of-the-art account of probability on networks will be indispensable for graduate students and researchers alike.

1. Some highlights
2. Random walks and electric networks
3. Special networks
4. Uniform spanning trees
5. Branching processes, second moments, and percolation
6. Isoperimetric inequalities
7. Percolation on transitive graphs
8. The mass-transport technique and percolation
9. Infinite electrical networks and Dirichlet functions
10. Uniform spanning forests
11. Minimal spanning forests
12. Limit theorems for Galton–Watson processes
13. Escape rate of random walks and embeddings
14. Random walks on groups and Poisson boundaries
15. Hausdorff dimension
16. Capacity and stochastic processes
17. Random walks on Galton–Watson trees.

Subject Areas: Probability & statistics [PBT], Discrete mathematics [PBD]