Statistical physics has its origins in attempts to describe the thermalproperties of matter in terms of its constituent particles and has played afundamental ro... » 

Statistical physics has its origins in attempts to describe the thermalproperties of matter in terms of its constituent particles and has played afundamental role in the development of quantum mechanics. Based on lecturestaught by Professor Kardar at MIT this textbook introduces the centralconcepts and tools of statistical physics. It contains a chapter on probabilityand related issues such as the central limit theorem and information theoryand covers interacting particles with an extensive description of the van derWaals equation and its derivation by mean field approximation. It also containsan integrated set of problems with solutions to selected problems at the endof the book and a complete set of solutions is available to lecturers on apassword protected website at www.cambridge.org9780521873420. A companionvolume Statistical Physics of Fields discusses nonmean field aspects ofscaling and critical phenomena through the perspective of renormalizationgroup. «