We establish the asymptotic behaviour of the partition function, the heat content, the integrated eigenvalue counting function, and, for certain points, the on-diagonal heat kernel of generalized Sierpinski carpets. For all these functions the leading term is of the form $x^{\gamma}\phi(\log x)$ for a suitable exponent $\gamma$ and $\phi$ a periodic function. We also discuss similar results for the heat content of affine nested fractals.

A duality formula is found for coalescing Brownian motions on the real line. It is shown that the joint distribution of a coalescing Brownian motion can be determined by another coalescing Brownian motion running backward. This duality is used to study a measure-valued process arising as the high density limit of the empirical measures of coalescing Brownian motions.

The infinitely divisible distributions on $\mathbb{R}^+$ of random variables $C_t$, $S_t$ and $T_t$ with Laplace transforms $$ \left( \frac{1}{\cosh \sqrt{2\lambda}} \right)^t, \quad \left( \frac{\sqrt{2\lambda}}{\sinh \sqrt{2\lambda}} \right)^t, \quad \text{and} \quad \left( \frac{\tanh \sqrt{2\lambda}}{\sqrt{2\lambda}} \right)^t $$ respectively are characterized for various $t>0$ in a number of different ways: by simple relations between their moments and cumulants, by corresponding relations between the distributions and their L\'evy measures, by recursions for their Mellin transforms, and by differential equations satisfied by their Laplace transforms. Some of these results are interpreted probabilistically via known appearances of these distributions for $t=1$ or $2$ in the description of the laws of various functionals of Brownian motion and Bessel processes, such as the heights and lengths of excursions of a one-dimensional Brownian motion. The distributions of $C_1$ and $S_2$ are also known to appear in the Mellin representations of two important functions in analytic number theory, the Riemann zeta function and the Dirichlet $L$-function associated with the quadratic character modulo~4. Related families of infinitely divisible laws, including the gamma, logistic and generalized hyperbolic secant distributions, are derived from $S_t$ and $C_t$ by operations such as Brownian subordination, exponential tilting, and weak limits, and characterized in various ways.

Explicit evaluations of the symmetric Euler integral $\int_0^1 u^{\alpha} (1-u)^{\alpha} f(u) \,du$ are obtained for some particular functions $f$. These evaluations are related to duplication formulae for Appell's hypergeometric function $F_1$ which give reductions of $F_1 (\alpha, \beta, \beta, 2 \alpha, y, z)$ in terms of more elementary functions for arbitrary $\beta$ with $z = y/(y-1)$ and for $\beta = \alpha + \half$ with arbitrary $y$, $z$. These duplication formulae generalize the evaluations of some symmetric Euler integrals implied by the following result: if a standard Brownian bridge is sampled at time $0$, time $1$, and at $n$ independent random times with uniform distribution on $[0,1]$, then the broken line approximation to the bridge obtained from these $n+2$ values has a total variation whose mean square is $n(n+1)/(2n+1)$.

The main new results in this paper are contained in the geometric Theorems 1 and~2 of Section~0.1 below and they are related to previous results of M.~Gromov and of myself (\cf\ \cite{1},~\cite{2}). These results are used to prove some general potential theoretic estimates on Lie groups (\cf\ Section~0.3) that are related to my previous work in the area (\cf\ \cite{3},~\cite{4}) and to some deep recent work of G.~Alexopoulos (\cf\ \cite{5},~\cite{21}).