Invariant Measures

Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0821809121, Paperback)

In 1940-1941 von Neumann lectured on invariant measures at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. This book is essentially a written version of those lectures. The lectures began with general measure theory and went on to Haar measure and some of its generalizations. Shizuo Kakutani was at the Institute that year, and he and von Neumann had many conversations on the subject. The conversations revealed facts and produced proofs. Quite a bit of the content of the course, especially toward the end, was discovered a few weeks before it appeared on the blackboard. The original version of these notes was prepared by Paul Halmos, von Neumann's assistant that year. Von Neumann read the handwritten version before it went to the typist and sometimes scribbled comments on the margins; he rewrote most of Chapter 6. This book is the first published version of the original notes.