The preface explains that the study of random matrixes was "[i]nitiated in the 1920s-1930s by statisticians and introduced in physics in the 1950s-1960s...[it] has become very active since the end of the 1970s under the flow of accelerating impulses from quantum field theory, quantum mechanics..., statistical mechanics, and condensed matter theory in physics, probability theory, statistics, combinatorics, operator theory, number theory, and theoretical computer science in mathematics, and also telecommunications theory, qualitative finances, structural mechanics, etc." The authors (whose affiliations are not stated) explain the scope of the field and the book's arrangement in three parts: the first devoted to classical ensembles, the second to the matrix models, and the third to "ensembles determined by independent but not necessarily Gaussian random variables." Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)