his concise monograph in probability by a well-known mathematician presumes a familiarity with Lebesgue's theory of measure and integration, the elementary theory of Fourier integrals, and the rudiments of number theory. Readers may then follow Mark Kac's attempt "to rescue statistical independence from the fate of abstract oblivion by showing how in its simplest form it arises in various contexts cutting across different mathematical disciplines." AUTHOR: Mark Kac (1914 1984) was born in Poland and came to the United States in the 1930s. He taught at Cornell and later served on the faculties of Rockefeller University in New York and the University of Southern California. His main focus was probability theory, and Dover also publishes his Mathematics and Logic, co-written with S. M. Ulam.