Lectures on phase transitions and the renormalization group

Covering the elementary aspects of the physics of phases transitions and the renormalization group, this popular book is widely used both for core graduate statistical mechanics courses as well as for more specialized courses. Emphasizing understanding and clarity rather than technical manipulation, these lectures de-mystify the subject and show precisely "how things work." Goldenfeld keeps in mind a reader who wants to understand why things are done, what the results are, and what in principle can go wrong. The book reaches both experimentalists and theorists, students and even active researchers, and assumes only a prior knowledge of statistical mechanics at the introductory graduate level.Advanced, never-before-printed topics on the applications of renormalization group far from equilibrium and to partial differential equations add to the uniqueness of this book.About the AuthorNigel Goldenfeld is Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge (U.K.) in 1982, and for the years 1982-1985 was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California at Santa Barbara. He is a University Scholar of the University of Illinois, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a recipient of the Xerox Award for research, a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Finance, and was an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow from 1987-1991.