The purpose of this book is to give a streamlined introduction to the
theory of (not necessarily symmetric) Dirichlet forms on general state
spaces. It includes both the analytic and the probabilistic part of the
theory up to and including the construction of an associated Markov
process. It is based on recent joint work of S. Albeverio and the two
authors and on a one-year-course on Dirichlet forms taught by the second
named author at the University of Bonn in 1990/9l. It addresses both
researchers and graduate students who require a quick but complete
introduction to the theory. Prerequisites are a basic course in
probabil- ity theory (including elementary martingale theory up to the
optional sampling theorem) and a sound knowledge of measure theory (as,
for example, to be found in Part I of H. Bauer [B 78]). Furthermore,
an elementary course on lin- ear operators on Banach and Hilbert spaces
(but without spectral theory) and a course on Markov processes would be
helpful though most of the material needed is included here.