Random Walks

This collection of articles is dedicated to Frank Spitzer on the occasion of his 65th birthday. The articles, written by a group of his friends, colleagues, former students and coauthors, are intended to demonstrate the major influence Frank has had on probability theory for the last 30 years and most likely will have for many years to come. Frank has always liked new phenomena, clean formulations and elegant proofs. He has created or opened up several research areas and it is not surprising that many people are still working out the consequences of his inventions. By way of introduction we have reprinted some of Franks seminal articles so that the reader can easily see for himself the point of origin for much of the research presented here. These articles of Franks deal with properties of Brownian motion, fluctuation theory and potential theory for random walks, and, of course, interacting particle systems. The last area was started by Frank as part of the general resurgence of treating problems of statistical mechanics with rigorous probabilistic tools.