Principles of Random Walk

In this edition a large number of errors have been corrected, an occasional proof has been streamlined, and a number of references are made to recent pro- gress. These references are to a supplementary bibliography, whose items are referred to as [S1] through [S26]. A thorough revision was not attempted. The development of the subject in the last decade would have required a treatment in a much more general con- text. It is true that a number of interesting questions remain open in the concrete setting of random walk on the integers. (See [S 19] for a recent survey). On the other hand, much of the material of this book (foundations, fluctuation theory, renewal theorems) is now available in standard texts, e.g. Feller [S9], Breiman [S1], Chung [S4] in the more general setting of random walk on the real line. But the major new development since the first edition occurred in 1969, when D. Ornstein [S22] and C. J. Stone [S26] succeeded in extending the recurrent potential theory in* Chapters II and VII from the integers to the reals. By now there is an extensive and nearly complete potential theory of recurrent random walk on locally compact groups, Abelian ( [S20], [S25]) as well as non- Abelian ( [S17], [S2] ). Finally, for the non-specialist there exists now an unsurpassed brief introduction to probabilistic potential theory, in the context of simple random walk and Brownian motion, by Dynkin and Yushkevich [S8].