lEt moi •...• si j'avait so comment en revenir, One service mathematics has rendered the je n'y serais point alle:' human race. It has put common sense back Ju1e. Veme where it belongs, 01\ the topmost shelf next to the dUlty canister labelled 'discarded non- Tbe series is divergent; therefore we may be sense'. able to do something with it. Erie T. Bell O. Heaviside Mathematics is a tool for thought. A highly necessary tool in a world where both feedback and non linearities abound. Similarly, all kinds of parts of mathematics serve as tools for other parts and for other sciences. Applying a simple reweiting rule to the quote on the right above one finds such statements as: 'One service topology has rendered mathematical physics .. .'; 'One service logic has rendered com puter science .. .'; 'One service category theory has rendered mathematics .. .'. All arguably true. And all statements obtainable this way form part of the raison d'tftre of this series.
The creative work of Andrei N. Kolmogorov is exceptionally wide-ranging. In his studies on trigonometric and orthogonal series, the theory of measure and integral, mathematical logic, approximation theory, geometry, topology, functional analysis, classical mechanics, ergodic theory, superposition of functions, and in formation theory, he solved many conceptual and fundamental problems and posed new questions which gave rise to a great deal of further research. Kolmogorov is one of the founders of the Soviet school of probability theory, mathematical statistics, and the theory of turbulence. In these areas he obtained a number of central results, with many applications to mechanics, geophysics, linguistics and biology, among other subjects. This edition includes Kolmogorov's most important papers on mathematics and the natural sciences. It does not include his philosophical and pedagogical studies, his articles written for the "Bolshaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya", his papers on prosody and applications of mathematics or his publications on general questions. The material of this edition was selected and compiled by Kolmogorov himself.
The first volume consists of papers on mathematics and also on turbulence and classical mechanics. The second volume is devoted to probability theory and mathematical statistics. The focus of the third volume is on information theory and the theory of algorithms.