This volume develops results on continuous time branching processes and applies them to study
rate of tumor growth extending classic work on the Luria-Delbruck distribution. As a
consequence the author calculate the probability that mutations that confer resistance to
treatment are present at detection and quantify the extent of tumor heterogeneity. As
applications the author evaluate ovarian cancer screening strategies and give rigorous proofs
for results of Heano and Michor concerning tumor metastasis. These notes should be accessible
to students who are familiar with Poisson processes and continuous time Markov chains. Richard
Durrett is a mathematics professor at Duke University USA. He is the author of 8 books over
200 journal articles and has supervised more than 40 Ph.D students. Most of his current
research concerns the applications of probability to biology: ecology genetics and most
recently cancer.
