A Kinetic View of Statistical Physics

Pavel L. Krapivsky is Research Associate Professor of Physics at Boston University. His current research interests are in strongly interacting many-particle systems and their applications to kinetic spin systems, networks, and biological phenomena. Sid Redner is a condensed-matter theorist whose research focuses on non-equilibrium statistical physics and its applications. Dr Redner has been on the physics faculty at Boston University since 1978 and has been a full professor since 1989. He has published 230 research articles and is the author of A Guide to First-Passage Processes (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Dr Redner is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and was a visiting scientist at Schlumberger Research in 1984–1985, the Ulam Scholar at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2004–2005 and a visiting professor at the Universite Paul Sabatier (Toulouse) and Universite Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris) in 2008. Eli Ben-Naim is a theoretical physicist who conducts research in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. His focus is interacting particle systems and their application to soft matter and complex systems. At the Theoretical Division in Los Alamos National Laboratory, he currently serves as the deputy group leader of the Physics of Condensed Matter and Complex Systems Group and is an affiliate of the Center of Nonlinear Studies. He received his B.Sc. in Physics and Mathematics from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem in 1990 and his Ph.D. in Physics from Boston University in 1994. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago before moving to Los Alamos. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (US) and the Institute of Physics (UK). He also serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Physics A, the Journal of Statistical Mechanics and the European Journal of Physics B.

• 1. Aperitifs; 2. Diffusion; 3. Collisions; 4. Exclusion; 5. Aggregation; 6. Fragmentation; 7. Adsorption; 8. Spin dynamics; 9. Coarsening; 10. Disorder; 11. Hysteresis; 12. Population dynamics; 13. Diffusive reactions; 14. Complex networks; References; Index.

'Non-equilibrium statistical mechanics has so many applications and is strewn with so many different tricks and treats that the only way to teach the subject is through examples. Krapivsky, Redner, and Ben-Naim have written a beautiful book that elegantly covers several of these examples, some classic, others at the boundaries of research. Their target readership is physicists and applied mathematicians, but includes computer scientists, biologists and engineers. Methinks that good students in economics would be well advised to read some chapters of this book, for I am convinced that several breakthroughs in their field will hinge upon concepts and methods from non-equilibrium statistical mechanics.' J. P. Bouchaud, Chairman of Capital Fund Management (Paris) and Statistical Mechanics Professor at Ecole Polytechnique