Measure Theory and Probability Theory [Paperback]

This is a graduate level textbook on measure theory and probability theory. It presents the main concepts and results in measure theory and probability theory in a simple and easy-to-understand way. It further provides heuristic explanations behind the theory to help students see the big picture. The book can be used as a text for a two semester sequence of courses in measure theory and probability theory, with an option to include supplemental material on stochastic processes and special topics. Prerequisites are kept to the minimal level and the book is intended primarily for first year Ph.D. students in mathematics and statistics.

This is a graduate level textbook on measure theory and probability theory. It presents the main concepts and results in measure theory and probability theory. It further provides heuristic explanations behind the theory to help students see the big picture.

This book arose out of two graduate courses that the authors have taught duringthepastseveralyears;the?rstonebeingonmeasuretheoryfollowed by the second one on advanced probability theory. The traditional approach to a ?rst course in measure theory, such as in Royden (1988), is to teach the Lebesgue measure on the real line, then the p di?erentation theorems of Lebesgue, L -spaces on R, and do general m- sure at the end of the course with one main application to the construction of product measures. This approach does have the pedagogic advantage of seeing one concrete case ?rst before going to the general one. But this also has the disadvantage in making many students perspective on m- sure theory somewhat narrow. It leads them to think only in terms of the Lebesgue measure on the real line and to believe that measure theory is intimately tied to the topology of the real line. As students of statistics, probability, physics, engineering, economics, and biology know very well, there are mass distributions that are typically nonuniform, and hence il�