This book covers the fundamentals of measure theory and probability theory. It begins with the construction of Lebesgue measure via Caratheodory's outer measure approach and goes on to discuss integration and standard convergence theorems and contains an entire chapter devoted to complex measures, Lp spaces, Radon-Nikodym theorem, and the Riesz representation theorem. It presents the elements of probability theory, the law of large numbers, and central limit theorem. The book then discusses discrete time Markov chains, stationary distributions and limit theorems. The appendix covers many basic topics such as metric spaces, topological spaces and the Stone-Weierstrass theorem.

This book provides readers with a concise introduction to current studies on operator-algebras and their generalizations, operator spaces and operator systems, with a special focus on their application in quantum information science. This basic framework for the mathematical formulation of quantum information can be traced back to the mathematical work of John von Neumann, one of the pioneers of operator algebras, which forms the underpinning of most current mathematical treatments of the quantum theory, besides being one of the most dynamic areas of twentieth century functional analysis. Today, von Neumann's foresight finds expression in the rapidly growing field of quantum information theory. These notes gather the content of lectures given by a very distinguished group of mathematicians and quantum information theorists, held at the IMSc in Chennai some years ago, and great care has been taken to present the material as a primer on the subject matter. Starting from the basic definitions of operator spaces and operator systems, this text proceeds to discuss several important theorems including Stinespring's dilation theorem for completely positive maps and Kirchberg's theorem on tensor products of C*-algebras. It also takes a closer look at the abstract characterization of operator systems and, motivated by the requirements of different tensor products in quantum information theory, the theory of tensor products in operator systems is discussed in detail. On the quantum information side, the book offers a rigorous treatment of quantifying entanglement in bipartite quantum systems, and moves on to review four different areas in which ideas from the theory of operator systems and operator algebras play a natural role: the issue of zero-error communication over quantum channels, the strong subadditivity property of quantum entropy, the different norms on quantum states and the corresponding induced norms on quantum channels, and, lastly, the applications of matrix-valued random variables in the quantum information setting.

The subject. The phrase "integral operator" (like some other mathematically informal phrases, such as "effective procedure" and "geometric construction") is sometimes defined and sometimes not. When it is defined, the definition is likely to vary from author to author. While the definition almost always involves an integral, most of its other features can vary quite considerably. Superimposed limiting operations may enter (such as L2 limits in the theory of Fourier transforms and principal values in the theory of singular integrals), IJ' spaces and abstract Banach spaces may intervene, a scalar may be added (as in the theory of the so-called integral operators of the second kind), or, more generally, a multiplication operator may be added (as in the theory of the so-called integral operators of the third kind). The definition used in this book is the most special of all. According to it an integral operator is the natural "continuous" generali zation of the operators induced by matrices, and the only integrals that appear are the familiar Lebesgue-Stieltjes integrals on classical non-pathological mea sure spaces. The category. Some of the flavor of the theory can be perceived in finite dimensional linear algebra. Matrices are sometimes considered to be an un natural and notationally inelegant way of looking at linear transformations. From the point of view of this book that judgement misses something."

Subfactors, a subject of considerable research activity for about fifteen years, are known to have significant relations with other fields such as low dimensional topology and algebraic quantum field theory. The authors present a new pictorial approach to subfactors in addition to discussions of basic principles. This book provides an important introduction to the subject and is aimed at students with only a little familiarity with the theory of Hilbert space and other newcomers to the field.

Why This Book: The theory of von Neumann algebras has been growing in leaps and bounds in the last 20 years. It has always had strong connections with ergodic theory and mathematical physics. It is now beginning to make contact with other areas such as differential geometry and K-Theory. There seems to be a strong case for putting together a book which (a) introduces a reader to some of the basic theory needed to appreciate the recent advances, without getting bogged down by too much technical detail; (b) makes minimal assumptions on the reader's background; and (c) is small enough in size to not test the stamina and patience of the reader. This book tries to meet these requirements. In any case, it is just what its title proclaims it to be -- an invitation to the exciting world of von Neumann algebras. It is hoped that after perusing this book, the reader might be tempted to fill in the numerous (and technically, capacious) gaps in this exposition, and to delve further into the depths of the theory. For the expert, it suffices to mention here that after some preliminaries, the book commences with the Murray - von Neumann classification of factors, proceeds through the basic modular theory to the III). classification of Connes, and concludes with a discussion of crossed-products, Krieger's ratio set, examples of factors, and Takesaki's duality theorem.