title: Statistical Mechanics: A Concise Introduction for Chemists
author: Benjamin Widom
description: "This elegant new book by Benjamin Widom provides an attractive alternative for those faculty and students who want to go further...Widom has written a volume...that shows students the beauty and power of the theory as well as some of its most important contemporary applications. The sections on molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo methods are amonng the best concise introductions to those techniques that I have read. The prose is clear and erudite reflecting the scientific and personal style of the author...This book should be in the hands of everyone who teaches undergraduate physical chemistry to provide a model for what can be tuaght in that course beyond the material contained in the standard textbooks. Graduate students and faculty who need to learn statistical mechanics can hardly find a better introduction. Even those who regularly teach a graduate course in this area will get some new ideas and inpsiration from one of the leading practitioners of the field." Jefferey Kovac
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  Statistical Physics of Particles
  Statistical physics has its origins in attempts to describe the thermal properties
  of matter in terms of its constituent particles, and has played a fundamental
  role in the development of quantum mechanics. It describes how new behavior
  emerges from interactions of many degrees of freedom, and as such has found
  applications outside physics in engineering, social sciences, and, increasingly,
  in biological sciences. This textbook introduces the central concepts and tools
  of statistical physics. It includes a chapter on probability and related issues
  such as the central limit theorem and information theory, not usually covered
  in existing texts. The book also covers interacting particles, and includes an
  extensive description of the van der Waals equation and its derivation by
  mean-field approximation. A companion volume, Statistical Physics of Fields,
  discusses non-mean field aspects of scaling and critical phenomena, t