Of the many accounts of Lord Byron's mission to Greece and his death at Missolonghi in 1824, very few were by eyewitnesses. In this 1825 book, William Parry (1773 1859) describes in detail Byron's last days, and records the poet's wishes and intentions with regard to the Greek independence movement. Parry was working in the naval dockyard at Greenwich when he was recruited by the London Greek Committee to organise an artillery brigade to join Byron in Greece. The original plan was scaled down, but in February 1824 Parry and some companions arrived in Missolonghi. Byron took to him, and Parry, effectively his right-hand man, was with him when he died. His book is in part a score-settling activity against the opposing factions of the Committee both in Greece and England, but it is also an important and detailed account of the death, and of the creation of a myth."

Ergodic theory grew out of an important problem of statistical mechanics which was resolved by Birkhoff and von Neumann in the 1930s. Since that time the subject has made its way to the centre of pure mathematics, drawing on the techniques of many other areas and, in turn, influencing those areas. The author has provided in this slim volume a speedy introduction to a considerable number of topics and examples. He includes sections on the classical ergodic theorems, topological dynamics, uniform distribution, Martingales, information theory and entropy. There is a chapter on mixing and one on special examples. The book concludes with an appendix on the spectral multiplicity theory of unitary operators.

The isomorphism problem of ergodic theory has been extensively studied since Kolmogorov's introduction of entropy into the subject and especially since Ornstein's solution for Bernoulli processes. Much of this research has been in the abstract measure-theoretic setting of pure ergodic theory. However, there has been growing interest in isomorphisms of a more restrictive and perhaps more realistic nature which recognize and respect the state structure of processes in various ways. These notes give an account of some recent developments in this direction. A special feature is the frequent use of the information function as an invariant in a variety of special isomorphism problems. Lecturers and postgraduates in mathematics and research workers in communication engineering will find this book of use and interest.