Statistical Mechanics: A Concise Introduction for Chemists

This is an introduction to statistical mechanics, intended to be used either in an undergraduate physical chemistry course or by beginning graduate students with little undergraduate background in the subject. It assumes familiarity with thermodynamics, chemical kinetics, the kinetic theory of gases, quantum mechanics and spectroscopy, at the level at which these subjects are normally treated in undergraduate physical chemistry. Highly illustrated with numerous exercises and worked solutions, it provides a concise, up-to-date treatise of statistical mechanics and is ideally suited to use in one semester courses.

Benjamin Widom is Goldwin Smith Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University, New York. He received his PhD in Physical Chemistry from that University (where he studied with S. H. Bauer) in 1953, and was a postdoctoral associate with O. K. Rice at the University of North Carolina, before joining the Cornell chemistry faculty in 1954. Professor Widom's research speciality is statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, particularly as applied to problems of phase equilibria, critical phenomena, and interfacial structure and thermodynamics. He is co-author with Professor Sir John Rowlinson, of the University of Oxford, of the research monograph Molecular Theory of Capilliarity (1982). Professor Widom has held numerous prestigious visitorships, including ones at Amsterdam (van der Waals Professor), Oxford (IBM Visiting Professor of Theoretical Chemistry), Leiden (Lorentz Professor), and Utrecht (Kramers/Debye Professor). He has had many awards in recognition of his research in statistical mechanics, including the Boltzmann Medal of the IUPAP Commission on Statistical Physics and the Onsager Medal of the University of Trondheim. He has honorary degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Utrecht, and has been elected to membership or fellowship of several scholarly academies including the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.