Probabilistic and analytical aspects of the umbral calculus (Q2785802)

This book is a study of the probabilistic and analytical aspects of the umbral calculus. It has only little overlap with existing books on the umbral calculus where combinatorial and algebraic aspects are stressed. It begins with an elegant presentation of the main ideas of Rota's umbral calculus and various applications (e.g. exponential families, approximation operators, orthogonal polynomials, semigroups of probability measures, integral representations of shift-invariant operators). One chapter is devoted to Banach algebras and gives a new treatment of existence problems of logarithms. This yields analytic results on the generating functions of sequences of convolution type. The last chapter is concerned with central limit theorems and infinitely divisible probability measures on \(\mathbb{N}\).