This IMA Volume in Mathematics and its Applications NONLINEAR STOCHASTIC PDEs: HYDRODYNAMIC LIMIT AND BURGERS' TURBULENCE is based on the proceedings of the period of concentration on Stochas tic Methods for Nonlinear PDEs which was an integral part of the 1993- 94 IMA program on "Emerging Applications of Probability." We thank Tadahisa Funaki and Wojbor A. Woyczynski for organizing this meeting and for editing the proceedings. We also take this opportunity to thank the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office, whose financial support made this workshop possible. A vner Friedman Willard Miller, Jr. xiii PREFACE A workshop on Nonlinear Stochastic Partial Differential Equations was held during the week of March 21 at the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications at the University of Minnesota. It was part of the Special Year on Emerging Applications of Probability program put together by an organizing committee chaired by J. Michael Steele. The selection of topics reflected personal interests of the organizers with two areas of emphasis: the hydrodynamic limit problems and Burgers' turbulence and related models. The talks and the papers appearing in this volume reflect a number of research directions that are currently pursued in these areas."

This volume contains two of the three lectures that were given at the 33rd Probability Summer School in Saint-Flour (July 6-23, 2003). Amir Dembo's course is devoted to recent studies of the fractal nature of random sets, focusing on some fine properties of the sample path of random walk and Brownian motion. In particular, the cover time for Markov chains, the dimension of discrete limsup random fractals, the multi-scale truncated second moment and the Ciesielski-Taylor identities are explored. Tadahisa Funaki's course reviews recent developments of the mathematical theory on stochastic interface models, mostly on the so-called \nabla \varphi interface model. The results are formulated as classical limit theorems in probability theory, and the text serves with good applications of basic probability techniques.