This paper establishes a basis for abelian categories, then gives the statement and proof of two equivalent definitions of an abelian category, the development of the basic theory of such categories, and the proof of some theorems involving this basic theory.

The aim of this work is the study of infinite conformal iterated function systems. More specifically, we investigate some properties of a limit set J associated to such system, its Hausdorff and packing measure and Hausdorff dimension. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for such systems to be bi-Lipschitz equivalent. We use the concept of scaling functions to obtain some result about 1-dimensional systems. We discuss particular examples of infinite iterated function systems derived from complex continued fraction expansions with restricted entries. Each system is obtained from an infinite number of contractions. We show that under certain conditions the limit sets of such systems possess zero Hausdorff measure and positive finite packing measure. We include an algorithm for an approximation of the Hausdorff dimension of limit sets. One numerical result is presented. In this thesis we also explore the concept of positively recurrent function. We use iterated function systems to construct a natural, wide class of such functions that have strong ergodic properties.

Robbins' problem is an optimal stopping problem where one seeks to minimize the expected rank of their observations among all observations. We examine random walk analogs to Robbins' problem in both discrete and continuous time. In discrete time, we consider full information and relative ranks versions of this problem. For three step walks, we give the optimal stopping rule and the expected rank for both versions. We also give asymptotic upper bounds for the expected rank in discrete time. Finally, we give upper and lower bounds for the expected rank in continuous time, and we show that the expected rank in the continuous time problem is at least as large as the normalized asymptotic expected rank in the full information discrete time version.

In this dissertation we study graph directed Markov systems (GDMS) and limit sets associated with these systems. Given a GDMS S, by the Hausdorff dimension spectrum of S we mean the set of all positive real numbers which are the Hausdorff dimension of the limit set generated by a subsystem of S. We say that S has full Hausdorff dimension spectrum (full HD spectrum), if the dimension spectrum is the interval [0, h], where h is the Hausdorff dimension of the limit set of S. We give necessary conditions for a finitely primitive conformal GDMS to have full HD spectrum. A GDMS is said to be regular if the Hausdorff dimension of its limit set is also the zero of the topological pressure function. We show that every number in the Hausdorff dimension spectrum is the Hausdorff dimension of a regular subsystem. In the particular case of a conformal iterated function system we show that the Hausdorff dimension spectrum is compact. We introduce several new systems: the nearest integer GDMS, the Gauss-like continued fraction system, and the Renyi-like continued fraction system. We prove that these systems have full HD spectrum. A special attention is given to the backward continued fraction …