This book contains the lectures given at the Conference on Dynamics and Randomness held at the Centro de Modelamiento Matematico of the Universidad de Chile from December 11th to 15th, 2000. This meeting brought together mathematicians, theoretical physicists and theoretical computer scientists, and graduate students interested in fields re lated to probability theory, ergodic theory, symbolic and topological dynam ics. We would like to express our gratitude to all the participants of the con ference and to the people who contributed to its organization. In particular, to Pierre Collet,...

This book contains the lectures given at the Conference on Dynamics and Randomness held at the Centro de Modelamiento Matematico of the Universidad de Chile from December 11th to 15th, 2000. This meeting brought together mathematicians, theoretical physicists and theoretical computer scientists, and graduate students interested in fields re lated to probability theory, ergodic theory, symbolic and topological dynam ics. We would like to express our gratitude to all the participants of the con ference and to the people who contributed to its organization. In particular, to Pierre Collet,...

Main concepts of quasi-stationary distributions (QSDs) for killed processes are the focus of the present volume. For diffusions, the killing is at the boundary and for dynamical systems there is a trap. The authors present the QSDs as the ones that allow describing the long-term behavior conditioned to not being killed. Studies in this research area started with Kolmogorov and Yaglom and in the last few decades have received a great deal of attention. The authors provide the exponential distribution property of the killing time for QSDs, present the more general result on their existence and...