A Second Course in Stochastic Processes

Rating:
Summary: A MUST-HAVE IF YOU WANNA GO TO WALLSTREET!
Review: In financial derivatives, people are generally dealing with all kinds of stochastic processes. This second course focuses on diffusion processes and prepares one with adequate knowledge to go ahead and understand how options are priced. This book itself does not touch any financial theory and will be of great use to people in genetics, mathematics and physics alike (finance also, of course). The authors give a chart of logical dependence of all the chaptors so you do not need to read every single corner if you are only interested in a specific topic. Readers are assumed to know Calculus and some basic probability theory. Knowledge of Brownian motion is not required and the authors succeded in keeping the math accessible. Although a mature senior might undertake this book, math in this book is not sloppy at all. Another thing I liked this book very much is there are so many excersices at the end of each chapter and one can check if he understands the materials or not. It's quite fair to give this book five stars.

Rating:
Summary: sequel to a first course
Review: Karlin and Taylor wrote a classic text on stochastic processes in their "A First Course in Stochastic Processes". The second edition of that text was published in 1975. This sequel came out in 1981. It is not only a second course but it is also intended as a second volume on a larger course in stochastic processes. The authors show that they are continuing from teh first course by picking up with Chapter 10 after the first book ended with Chapter 9. Many of the topics in the first book are continued in this text including Markov chains and Diffusions. Heavy emphasis is placed on point processes and their applications including Poisson and compound Poisson processes, population growth models and queueing processes.

Rating:
Summary: sequel to a first course
Review: Karlin and Taylor wrote a classic text on stochastic processes in their "A First Course in Stochastic Processes". The second edition of that text was published in 1975. This sequel came out in 1981. It is not only a second course but it is also intended as a second volume on a larger course in stochastic processes. The authors show that they are continuing from teh first course by picking up with Chapter 10 after the first book ended with Chapter 9. Many of the topics in the first book are continued in this text including Markov chains and Diffusions. Heavy emphasis is placed on point processes and their applications including Poisson and compound Poisson processes, population growth models and queueing processes.