It is known that in a stationary Brownian queue with both arrival and service processes equal in law to Brownian motion, the departure process is a Brownian motion, identical in law to the arrival process: this is the analogue of Burke's theorem in this context. In this paper we prove convergence in law to this Brownian motion in a tandem network of Brownian queues: if we have an arbitrary continuous process, satisfying some mild conditions, as an initial arrival process and pass it through an infinite tandem network of queues, the resulting process weakly converges to a Brownian motion. We assume independent and exponential initial workloads for all queues.

In this paper we investigate the functional central limit theorem (CLT) for stochastic processes associated to partial sums of additive functionals of reversible Markov chains with general spate space, under the normalization standard deviation of partial sums. For this case, we show that the functional CLT is equivalent to the fact that the variance of partial sums is regularly varying with exponent 1 and the partial sums satisfy the CLT. It is also equivalent to the conditional CLT.

It is shown that the celebrated result of Sparre Andersen for random walks and Lévy processes has intriguing consequences when the last time of the process in (-∞, 0], say σ, is added to the picture. In the case of no positive jumps this leads to six random times, all of which have the same distribution—the uniform distribution on [0, σ]. Surprisingly, this result does not appear in the literature, even though it is based on some classical observations concerning exchangeable increments.

We study a classical multitype Galton–Watson process with mutation and selection. The individuals are sequences of fixed length over a finite alphabet. On the sharp peak fitness landscape together with independent mutations per locus, we show that, as the length of the sequences goes to ∞ and the mutation probability goes to 0, the asymptotic relative frequency of the sequences differing on k digits from the master sequence approaches (σe-a - 1)(ak/k!)∑i≥ 1ik/σi, where σ is the selective advantage of the master sequence and a is the product of the length of the chains with the mutation probability. The probability distribution Q(σ, a) on the nonnegative integers given by the above equation is the quasispecies distribution with parameters σ and a.

In this paper we study a special class of size dependent branching processes. We assume that for some positive integer K as long as the population size does not exceed level K, the process evolves as a discrete-time supercritical branching process, and when the population size exceeds level K, it evolves as a subcritical or critical branching process. It is shown that this process does die out in finite time T. The question of when the mean value E(T) is finite or infinite is also addressed.

In this paper we study a generalized coupon collector problem, which consists of analyzing the time needed to collect a given number of distinct coupons that are drawn from a set of coupons with an arbitrary probability distribution. We suppose that a special coupon called the null coupon can be drawn but never belongs to any collection. In this context, we prove that the almost uniform distribution, for which all the nonnull coupons have the same drawing probability, is the distribution which stochastically minimizes the time needed to collect a fixed number of distinct coupons. Moreover, we show that in a given closed subset of probability distributions, the distribution with all its entries, but one, equal to the smallest possible value is the one which stochastically maximizes the time needed to collect a fixed number of distinct coupons.

This note is motivated by Blom's work in 1989. We consider a generalized Ehrenfest urn model in which a randomly-chosen ball has a positive probability of moving from one urn to the other urn. We use recursion relations between the mean transition times to derive formulas in terms of finite sums, which are shown to be equivalent to the definite integrals obtained by Blom.