There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Convergence of Probability Measures. By P. Billingsley. Chichester, Sussex, Wiley, 1968. xii, 253 p. 9 1/4“. 117s.

Convergence of Probability Measures

The author's preface gives an outline: "This book is about weakconvergence methods in metric spaces, with applications sufficient to show their power and utility. The Introduction motivates the definitions and indicates how the theory will yield solutions to problems arising outside it. Chapter 1 sets out the basic general theorems, which are then specialized in Chapter 2 to the space C[0, l ] of continuous functions on the unit interval and in Chapter 3 to the space D [0, 1 ] of functions with discontinuities of the first kind. The results of the first three chapters are used in Chapter 4 to derive a variety of limit theorems for dependent sequences of random variables. " The book develops and expands on Donsker's 1951 and 1952 papers on the invariance principle and empirical distributions. The basic random variables remain real-valued although, of course, measures on C[0, l ] and D[0, l ] are vitally used. Within this framework, there are various possibilities for a different and apparently better treatment of the material. More of the general theory of weak convergence of probabilities on separable metric spaces would be useful. Metrizability of the convergence is not brought up until late in the Appendix. The close relation of the Prokhorov metric and a metric for convergence in probability is (hence) not mentioned (see V. Strassen, Ann. Math. Statist. 36 (1965), 423-439; the reviewer, ibid. 39 (1968), 1563-1572). This relation would illuminate and organize such results as Theorems 4.1, 4.2 and 4.4 which give isolated, ad hoc connections between weak convergence of measures and nearness in probability. In the middle of p. 16, it should be noted that C*(S) consists of signed measures which need only be finitely additive if 5 is not compact. On p. 239, where the author twice speaks of separable subsets having nonmeasurable cardinal, he means "discrete" rather than "separable." Theorem 1.4 is Ulam's theorem that a Borel probability on a complete separable metric space is tight. Theorem 1 of Appendix 3 weakens completeness to topological completeness. After mentioning that probabilities on the rationals are tight, the author says it is an

Convergence of probability measures

We explore in this chapter questions of existence and uniqueness for solutions to stochastic differential equations and offer a study of their properties. This endeavor is really a study of diffusion processes. Loosely speaking, the term diffusion is attributed to a Markov process which has continuous sample paths and can be characterized in terms of its infinitesimal generator.

Stochastic Differential Equations

Preface to the revised edition Remarks on notation 1. Basic examples 2. Characterization and existence 3. Stable processes and their extensions 4. The Levy-Ito decomposition of sample functions 5. Distributional properties of Levy processes 6. Subordination and density transformation 7. Recurrence and transience 8. Potential theory for Levy processes 9. Wiener-Hopf factorizations 10. More distributional properties Supplement Solutions to exercises References and author index Subject index.

Lévy processes and infinitely divisible distributions

We study exclusion processes on the integer lattice in which particles change their velocities due to stickiness. Specifically, whenever two or more particles occupy adjacent sites, they stick together for an extended period of time, and the entire particle system is slowed down until the ``collision'' is resolved. We show that under diffusive scaling of space and time such processes converge to what one might refer to as a sticky reflected Brownian motion in the wedge. The latter behaves as a Brownian motion with constant drift vector and diffusion matrix in the interior of the wedge, and reflects at the boundary of the wedge after spending an instant of time there. In particular, this leads to a natural multidimensional generalization of sticky Brownian motion on the half-line, which is of interest in both queuing theory and stochastic portfolio theory. For instance, this can model a market, which experiences a slowdown due to a major event (such as a court trial between some of the largest firms in the market) deciding about the new market leader.

Multidimensional sticky Brownian motions as limits of exclusion processes

We investigate the behavior of systems of interacting diffusion processes, known as volatility-stabilized market models in the mathematical finance literature, when the number of diffusions tends to infinity. We show that, after an appropriate rescaling of the time parameter, the empirical measure of the system converges to the solution of a degenerate parabolic partial differential equation. A stochastic representation of the latter in terms of one-dimensional distributions of a time-changed squared Bessel process allows us to give an explicit description of the limit.

Large volatility-stabilized markets

We show that for all positive beta the semigroups of beta-Dyson Brownian motions of different dimensions are intertwined. The proof relates beta-Dyson Brownian motions directly to Jack symmetric polynomials and omits an approximation of the former by discrete space Markov chains, thereby disposing of the technical assumption beta>1 in [GS]. The corresponding results for beta-Dyson Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes are also presented.

Intertwinings of beta-Dyson Brownian motions of different dimensions

We propose two structural models for stochastic losses given default which allow to model the credit losses of a portfolio of defaultable financial instruments. The credit losses are integrated into a structural model of default events accounting for correlations between the default events and the associated losses. We show how the models can be calibrated and analyze the impact of correlations between the occurrences of defaults and recoveries by testing our models for a representative sample portfolio.

Two Models of Stochastic Loss Given Default

Nous montrons que pour tout $\beta>0$, les semigroupes des $\beta$-mouvements browniens de Dyson sont entrelaces. La preuve consiste a relier directement les $\beta$-mouvements browniens de Dyson aux polynomes symetriques de Jack, et evite donc un argument d’approximation par des chaines de Markov a espace d’etat discret, ce qui permet de se debarrasser de l’hypothese technique $\beta\ge1$ faite dans (Probab. Theory Related Fields 163 (2015) 413–463). Les resultats correspondants pour les processus $\beta$-Ornstein Uhlenbeck de Dyson sont aussi presentes.

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Mykhaylo Shkolnikov

Papers

Multidimensional sticky Brownian motions as limits of exclusion processes

Large volatility-stabilized markets

Intertwinings of beta-Dyson Brownian motions of different dimensions

Two Models of Stochastic Loss Given Default

Intertwinings of beta-Dyson Brownian motions of different dimensions