Combinatorial Stochastic Processes

Jim Pitman is a Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has been employed since 1978.  He attended the Australian National University and The University of Sheffield.

• Preliminaries.- Bell polynomials, composite structures and Gibbs partitions.- Exchangeable random partitions.- Sequential constructions of random partitions.- Poisson constructions of random partitions.- Coagulation and fragmentation processes.- Random walks and random forests.- The Brownian forest.- Brownian local times, branching and Bessel processes.- Brownian bridge asymptotics for random mappings.- Random forests and the additive coalescent.

From the reviews: "The intertwining of many aspects of combinatorics and probability is treated in the book under review. ... I think this is an important book for a variety of mathematicians. Moreover, the good exercises provided in each section and a good bibliography make the book suitable as a textbook for topics courses and as a reference for particular topics in various standard courses." (Bert Fristedt, Mathematical Reviews, Issue 2008 c)