Since its inception by Perron and Frobenius, the theory of non-negative matrices has developed enormously and is now being used and extended in applied fields of study as diverse as probability theory, numerical analysis, demography, mathematical economics, and dynamic programming, while its development is still proceeding rapidly as a branch of pure mathematics in its own right. While there are books which cover this or that aspect of the theory, it is nevertheless not uncommon for workers in one or another branch of its development to be unaware of what is known in other branches, even though there is often formal overlap. One of the purposes of this book is to relate several aspects of the theory, insofar as this is possible. The author hopes that the book will be useful to mathematicians; but in particular to the workers in applied fields, so the mathematics has been kept as simple as could be managed. The mathematical requisites for reading it are: some knowledge of real-variable theory, and matrix theory; and a little knowledge of complex-variable; the emphasis is on real-variable methods. (There is only one part of the book, the second part of 55.5, which is of rather specialist interest, and requires deeper knowledge.) Appendices provide brief expositions of those areas of mathematics needed which may be less g- erally known to the average reader.
This book is a photographic reproduction of the book of the same title published in
1981, for which there has been continuing demand on account of its accessible technical level. Its appearance also helped generate considerable subsequent work on inhomogeneous products of matrices. This printing adds an additional bibliography on coefficients of ergodicity and a list of corrigenda.
Eugene Seneta received his Ph.D. in 1968 from the Australian National University. He left Canberra in 1979 to become Professor and Head of the Department of Mathematical Statistics at the University of Sydney. He has been a regular visitor to the United States, most frequently to the University of Virginia. Now Emeritus Professor at the University of Sydney, he has recently developed a renewed interest in financial mathematics. He was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1985 and awarded the Pitman Medal of the Statistical Society of Australia for his distinguished research contributions.
The first edition of this book, entitled Non-Negative Matrices, appeared in 1973, and was followed in 1976 by his Regularly Varying Functions in the Springer Lecture Notes in Mathematics, later translated into Russian. Both books were pioneering in their fields. In 1977, Eugene Seneta coauthored (with C. C. Heyde ) I.J. Bienaymé : Statistical Theory Anticipated, which is effectively a history of probability and statistics in the 19th century, and in 2001 co-edited with the same colleague Statisticians of the Centuries, both published by Springer. Having served on the editorial board of the Encyclopedia of Statistical Science, he is currently Joint Editor of the International Statistical Review.
