This book provides a complete one-semester introduction to probability, combining intuition, rigorous analysis, and numerical methods. A key feature of the book is its numerous exercises, which encourage learning by doing. About half of these exercises are accompanied by detailed solutions, making the book suitable for self-study.

The topics covered include the standard material for such courses: combinatorics, discrete and continuous models, and the convergence of random variables and distributions. An additional chapter is devoted to Markov chains and their applications.

The target audience consists of second-year students in engineering, information sciences, economics, and mathematics. The mathematical level is kept accessible, while fostering connections with related topics that students may have encountered in other courses.

Paolo Baldi has been Full Professor of Mathematics at the University of Rome "Tor Vergata." He earned his degree in Mathematics from the University of Pisa in 1971 and later obtained a Doctorat d'État ès Sciences from Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI) in 1985. His academic career began in Pisa, where he served as an assistant from 1971 to 1980 and then as Associate Professor of Probability and Statistics until 1986. He subsequently held a Full Professorship in Mathematical Statistics at the University of Catania from 1986 to 1990 before joining Tor Vergata. His research focuses primarily on probability theory, with particular emphasis on large deviations, diffusion processes, and their applications to simulation and finance, including importance sampling techniques. He has also contributed to the study of random fields on the sphere, algebraic structures, and earlier to random walks on groups. He is the author of approximately 60 research papers and several textbooks.