The intention of this book is to explain to a mathematician having no previous knowledge in this domain, what "noncommutative probability" is. So the first decision was not to concentrate on a special topic. For different people, the starting points of such a domain may be different. In what concerns this question, different variants are not discussed. One such variant comes from Quantum Physics. The motivations in this book are mainly mathematical; more precisely, they correspond to the desire of developing a probability theory in a new set-up and obtaining results analogous to the classical...

Labor omnia vincit improbus. VIRGIL, Georgica I, 144-145. In the first part of his Theoria combinationis observationum erroribus min imis obnoxiae, published in 1821, Carl Friedrich Gauss Gau80, p.10] deduces a Chebyshev-type inequality for a probability density function, when it only has the property that its value always decreases, or at least does l not increase, if the absolute value of x increases . One may therefore conjecture that Gauss is one of the first scientists to use the property of 'single-humpedness' of a probability density function in a meaningful probabilistic context....

Labor omnia vincit improbus. VIRGIL, Georgica I, 144-145. In the first part of his Theoria combinationis observationum erroribus min- imis obnoxiae, published in 1821, Carl Friedrich Gauss [Gau80, p.10] deduces a Chebyshev-type inequality for a probability density function, when it only has the property that its value always decreases, or at least does l not increase, if the absolute value of x increases . One may therefore conjecture that Gauss is one of the first scientists to use the property of 'single-humpedness' of a probability density function in a meaningful probabilistic context....