ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Hahn–Kolmogorov theorem

Hey kiddo! Do you know what a process is? Like when we do things step by step, like putting on our shoes or making a cake?

Well, sometimes we want to know what will happen in a process in the future - like how many cakes we will make in the next hour or how much money we will have in our piggy bank in the next few days. But we don't always know for sure what will happen in the future.

That's where the Hahn-Kolmogorov Theorem comes in. It helps us predict what will happen in the future based on what we know has already happened.

It's kind of like if we were making a cake and we had already mixed the flour and sugar together. Based on that information, we can predict what the cake will look like once we bake it.

The Hahn-Kolmogorov Theorem helps us do something similar with things called stochastic processes. These are processes where we know there is some randomness involved - like a coin flip or the stock market going up and down.

Basically, the Hahn-Kolmogorov Theorem says that if we know what happened in the past and we have some probabilities for what could happen next, we can use that information to predict what will happen at any point in the future.

Kind of like if we flipped a coin 10 times and it came up heads 7 times and tails 3 times. Based on that information, we can predict what the chance is of it being heads or tails on the next flip.

So, the Hahn-Kolmogorov Theorem is like having a magic crystal ball that helps us make predictions about the future based on what we already know has happened. Pretty cool, huh?