Second order linear parabolic and elliptic equations arise frequently in mathematical physics, biology and finance. Here the authors present a state of the art treatment of the subject from a new perspective. They then go on to discuss how the results in the book can be applied to control theory. This area is developing rapidly and there are numerous notes and references that point the reader to more specialized results not covered in the book. Coverage of some essential background material helps to make the book self contained.

Mathematical theory of discrete time decision processes, also known as stochastic control, is based on two major ideas: backward induction and conditioning. It has a large number of applications in almost all branches of the natural sciences. The aim of these notes is to give a self-contained introduction to this theory and its applications. Our intention was to give a global and mathematically precise picture of the subject and present well motivated examples. We cover systems with complete or partial information as well as with complete or partial observation. We have tried to present in a...

The notes are based on lectures on stochastic processes given at Scuola Normale Superiore in 1999 and 2000. Some new material was added and only selected, less standard results were presented. We did not include several applications to statistical mechanics and mathematical finance, covered in the lectures, as we hope to write part two of the notes devoted to applications of stochastic processes in modelling. The main themes of the notes are constructions of stochastic processes. We present different approaches to the existence question proposed by Kolmogorov, Wiener, Ito and Prohorov....