Brownian motion on the discontinuous structure of matter". The direction of the force of atomic bombardment is constantly changing, and at different times the particle is hit more on one side than another, leading to the seemingly random nature of the motion. The many-body interactions that yield the Brownian pattern cannot be solved by a model accounting for every involved molecule. In consequence only probabilistic models applied to molecular populations can be employed to describe it. Two such models of the statistical mechanics, due to Einstein and Smoluchowski are presented below. Another, pure probabilistic class of models is the class of the
Brownian excursion Groeneboom (1983) and Pitman (1983) give decompositions of Brownian motion formula_5 in terms of i.i.d Brownian excursions and the least concave majorant (or greatest convex minorant) of formula_5. For an introduction to Itô's general theory of Brownian excursions and the Itô Poisson process of excursions, see Revuz and Yor (1994), chapter XII. The Brownian excursion area arises in connection with the enumeration of connected graphs, many other problems in combinatorial theory; see e.g.,, and the limit distribution of the Betti numbers of certain varieties in cohomology theory. Takacs (1991a) shows that formula_19 has density where formula_21 are the zeros of