This book contains the lectures given at the II Canference an Dynamics
and Randamness held at the Centro de Modelamiento Matematico of the
Universidad de Chile, from December 9th to 13th, 2002. This meeting
brought together mathematicians, theoretical physicists, theoretical
computer scientists, and graduate students interested in fields related
to probability theory, ergodic theory, symbolic and topological
dynamics. We would like to express our gratitude to an the participants
of the conference and to the people who contributed to its orga-
nization. In particular, to Pierre Collet, BerIiard Rost and Karl
Petersen for their scientific advise. We want to thank warmly the
authors of each chapter for their stimulating lectures and for their
manuscripts devoted to a various of appealing subjects in probability
and dynamics: to Jean Bertoin for his course on Some aspects of random
fragmentation in con- tinuous time; to Anton Bovier for his course on
Metastability and ageing in stochastic dynamics; to Steve Lalley for his
course on AI- gebraic systems of generat ing functions and return
probabilities for random walks; to Elon Lindenstrauss for his course on
Recurrent measures and measure rigidity; to Sylvie Meleard for her
course on Stochastic particle approximations for two-dimensional N
avier- Stokes equations; and to Anatoly Vershik for his course on Random
and universal metric spaces.
