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This volume features selected and peer-reviewed articles from the Pan-American Advanced Studies Institute (PASI). The chapters are written by international specialists who participated in the conference. Topics include developments based on breakthroughs in the mathematical understanding of phenomena describing systems in highly inhomogeneous and disordered media, including the KPZ universality class (describing the evolution of interfaces in two dimensions), random walks in random environment and percolative systems. PASI fosters a collaboration between North American and Latin American researchers and students. The conference that inspired this volume took place in January 2012 in both Santiago de Chile and Buenos Aires. Researchers and graduate students will find timely research in probability theory, statistical physics and related disciplines.

These twenty-six expository papers on random matrices and products of random matrices survey the major results of the last thirty years. They reflect both theoretical and applied concerns in fields as diverse as computer science, probability theory, mathematical physics, and population biology. Many of the articles are tutorial, consisting of examples, sketches of proofs, and interpretations of results. They address a wide audience of mathematicians and scientists who have an elementary knowledge of probability theory and linear algebra, but not necessarily any prior exposure to this specialized area. More advanced articles, aimed at specialists in allied areas, survey current research with references to the original literature. The book's major topics include the computation and behavior under perturbation of Lyapunov exponents and the spectral theory of large random matrices. The applications to mathematical and physical sciences under consideration include computer image generation, card shuffling, and other random walks on groups, Markov chains in random environments, the random Schroedinger equations and random waves in random media. Most of the papers were originally presented at an AMS-IMS-SIAM Joint Summer Research Conference held at Bowdoin College in June, 1984. Of special note are the papers by Kotani on random Schroedinger equations, Yin and Bai on spectra for large random matrices, and Newman on the relations between the Lyapunov and eigenvalue spectra.