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Mixing (mathematics)


In mathematics, mixing is an abstract concept originating from physics: the attempt to describe the irreversible thermodynamic process of mixing in the everyday world: mixing paint, mixing drinks, etc.

The concept appears in ergodic theory—the study of and measure-preserving dynamical systems. Several different definitions for mixing exist, including strong mixing, weak mixing and topological mixing, with the last not requiring a measure to be defined. Some of the different definitions of mixing can be arranged in a hierarchical order; thus, strong mixing implies weak mixing. Furthermore, weak mixing (and thus also strong mixing) implies ergodicity: that is, every system that is weakly mixing is also ergodic (and so one says that mixing is a "stronger" notion than ergodicity).

Let be a sequence of random variables. Such a sequence is naturally endowed with a topology, the product topology. The open sets of this topology are called cylinder sets. These cylinder sets generate a sigma algebra, the Borel sigma algebra; it is the smallest (coarsest) sigma algebra that contains the topology.


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