Brownian Motion And Diffusion

Brownian Motion and Diffusion

A long time ago I started writing a book about Markov chains, Brownian motion, and diffusion. I soon had two hundred pages of manuscript and my publisher was enthusiastic. Some years and several drafts later, I had a thot:sand pages of manuscript, and my publisher was less enthusiastic. So we made it a trilogy: Markov Chains Brownian Motion and Diffusion Approximating Countable Markov Chains familiarly - Me, B & D, and ACM. I wrote the first two books for beginning graduate students with some knowledge of probability; if you can follow Sections 3.4 to 3.9 of Brownian Motion and Diffusion you're in. The first two books are quite independent of one another, and completely independent of the third. This last book is a monograph, which explains one way to think about chains with instantaneous states. The results in it are supposed to be new, except where there are spe cific disclaimers; it's written in the framework of Markov Chains. Most of the proofs in the trilogy are new, and I tried hard to make them explicit. The old ones were often elegant, but I seldom saw what made them go. With my own, I can sometimes show you why things work. And, as I will argue in a minute, my demonstrations are easier technically. If I wrote them down well enough, you may come to agree.

Essentials of Brownian Motion and Diffusion

Simple Brownian Diffusion

Brownian diffusion is the motion of one or more solute molecules in a sea of very many, much smaller solvent molecules. Its importance today owes mainly to cellular chemistry, since Brownian diffusion is one of the ways in which key reactant molecules move about inside a living cell. This book focuses on the four simplest models of Brownian diffusion: the classical Fickian model, the Einstein model, the discrete-stochastic (cell-jumping) model, and the Langevin model. The authors carefully develop the theories underlying these models, assess their relative advantages, and clarify their conditions of applicability. Special attention is given to the stochastic simulation of diffusion, and to showing how simulation can complement theory and experiment. Two self-contained tutorial chapters, one on the mathematics of random variables and the other on the mathematics of continuous Markov processes (stochastic differential equations), make the book accessible to researchers from a broad spectrum of technical backgrounds.