Table of Contents

Useful Notions of Probability Theory.- Sums of Random Variables, Random Walks and the Central Limit Theorem.- Large Deviations.- Power Law Distributions.- Fractals and Multifractals.- Rank-Ordering Statistics and Heavy Tails.- Statistical Mechanics: Probabilistic Point of View and the Concept of “Temperature”.- Long-Range Correlations.- Phase Transitions: Critical Phenomena and First-Order Transitions.- Transitions, Bifurcations and Precursors.- The Renormalization Group.- The Percolation Model.- Rupture Models.- Mechanisms for Power Laws.- Self-Organized Criticality.- to the Physics of Random Systems.- Randomness and Long-Range Laplacian Interactions.