Statistical Mechanics II
Time: MWF 9:35 - 10:25 (with some adjustments around graduate recruiting weekends and the ACS conference in late March)
Location: 310 Jordan
Professor: Dan Gezelter
phone: 631-7595
office: 258 Stepan Chemistry
e-mail: gezelter.1@nd.edu
Office hours: By appointment
Web page: www.nd.edu/~gezelter/Teaching/60642
Texts: Introduction to Modern Statistical Mechanics, by David Chandler
Statistical Mechanics, by Donald A. McQuarrie
These books have been ordered by the Hammes Bookstore.
There is also a list of books on reserve for this class.
Syllabus: www.nd.edu/~gezelter/Teaching/60642/syllabus.html
Grade:
Problem Sets (roughly bi-weekly): 30%
In-class Midterm: 20%
Open-book take-home Final: 20%
Computational projects (2 of them): 25%
Class Participation & attendance: 5%
Other: Statistical Mechanics deals with some intellectually challenging material. The only way to learn the subject is to actually do the problems on your own. Do not use Google as your second brain. After you have made an honest and painful individual attempt at solving a problem, you may confer with your classmates or with me. However, you must write up the solutions to the problems on your own. Solutions which are incorrect, but which have good written explanations of why each step was carried out, will be given higher scores than those which do not.

The take-home final must be done completely independently.

The computational projects will require some amount of coding. ANY computer language may be used (including Matlab, Python, etc.) If you need access to a computer on which to do these projects, please let me know. These projects may be done in pairs.

You may email me at any time with questions.
Problem Sets: I'll be posting the problem sets on the problem set web page each week.