Böcker av Vivek S. Borkar

This book develops the concepts of fundamental convex analysis and optimization by using advanced calculus and real analysis. Brief accounts of advanced calculus and real analysis are included within the book. The emphasis is on building a geometric intuition for the subject, which is aided further by supporting figures. Two distinguishing features of this book are the use of elementary alternative proofs of many results and an eclectic collection of useful concepts from optimization and convexity often needed by researchers in optimization, game theory, control theory, and mathematical economics. A full chapter on optimization algorithms gives an overview of the field, touching upon many current themes. The book is useful to advanced undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers in the fields mentioned above and in various engineering disciplines.

This comprehensive volume on ergodic control for diffusions highlights intuition alongside technical arguments. A concise account of Markov process theory is followed by a complete development of the fundamental issues and formalisms in control of diffusions. This then leads to a comprehensive treatment of ergodic control, a problem that straddles stochastic control and the ergodic theory of Markov processes. The interplay between the probabilistic and ergodic-theoretic aspects of the problem, notably the asymptotics of empirical measures on one hand, and the analytic aspects leading to a characterization of optimality via the associated Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation on the other, is clearly revealed. The more abstract controlled martingale problem is also presented, in addition to many other related issues and models. Assuming only graduate-level probability and analysis, the authors develop the theory in a manner that makes it accessible to users in applied mathematics, engineering, finance and operations research.