Phase Transitions: A Brief Account With Modern Applications

"The Gittermans in their short book achieve the goals of simplicity, brevity, and the treatment of a wide variety of modern systems surprisingly well. Based on lectures given for an advanced graduate course, this book would be a good supplementary resource in a graduate statistical mechanics class, or it could be used as a text and reference in a seminar course." Choice "Despite the brevity of the chapters, many topics are discussed in them ... The authors have tried to avoid formalism as much as possible but have succeeded in presenting the basic ideas in an illuminating way. In many cases, the developments produce important insights into the approaches given in the literature and into the underlying physics behind these approaches ... it will be useful for graduate students and researchers in the field of phase transitions." Journal of Statistical Physics "This book is interesting, but it presupposes a good scientific 'culture', otherwise you will need a mentor to clarify the framework." Zentralblatt MATH