Brownian web is what we now call the Brownian web. Formally speaking, it is a collection of one-dimensional coalescing Brownian motions starting from every space-time point in formula_1. The fact that the Brownian web consists of an "uncountable" number of Brownian motions is what makes the construction highly non-trivial. Arratia gave a construction but was unable to prove convergence of coalescing random walks to a limiting object and characterize such a limiting object. Tóth and Werner in their study of the true self-repelling motion obtained many detailed properties of this limiting object and its dual but did not prove convergence of coalescing
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