Rolf-Dieter Reiss

Jürg Hüsler

The urgent need to describe and to solve certain problems connected to extreme phenomena in various areas of applications has been of decisive influence on the vital development of extreme value theory. After the pioneering work of M. Frechet (1927) and of R.A. Fisher and L.R.C. Tippett (1928), who discovered the limiting distributions of extremes, the importance of mathematical concepts of extreme behavior in applications was impressively demonstrated by statisticians like E.J. Gumbel and W. Weibull. The predominant role of applied aspects in that early period may be highlighted by the fact that two of the "Fisher-Tippett asymptotes" also carry the names of Gumbel and Weibull. In the last years, the complexity of problems and their tractability by mathematical methods stimulated a rapid development of mathematical theory that substantially helped to improve our understanding of extreme behavior. Due to the depth and richness of mathematical ideas, extreme value theory has become more and more of interest for mathematically oriented research workers. This was one of the reasons to organize a conference on extreme value theory which was held at the Mathematische Forschungsinstitut at Oberwolfach (FRG) in December 1987.

Proceedings of a Conference held in Oberwolfach, Dec. 6–12, 1987

Extreme Value Theory

Michael Falk

J]rg H]sler

Since the publication of the first edition of this seminar book in 1994, the theory and applications of extremes and rare events have enjoyed an enormous and still increasing interest. The intention of the book is to give a mathematically oriented development of the theory of rare events underlying various applications. This characteristic of the book was strengthened in the second edition by incorporating various new results on about 130 additional pages. Part II, which has been added in the second edition, discusses recent developments in multivariate extreme value theory. Particularly notable is a new spectral decomposition of multivariate distributions in univariate ones which makes multivariate questions more accessible in theory and practice. One of the most innovative and fruitful topics during the last decades was the introduction of generalized Pareto distributions in the univariate extreme value theory. Such a statistical modelling of extremes is now systematically developed in the multivariate framework.

Rolf-Dieter Reiss

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