

Statistical Mechanics: Entropy, Order Parameters, and Complexity (free ebook) - TriinT
http://pages.physics.cornell.edu/sethna/StatMech/

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aswanson
Humanity has generated too much information for me to absorb. I'll never be
able to learn it all. There, I finally admitted it.

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TriinT
Same here :-( I would need a 1000 years to learn all the things and work on
all the projects I would like to. Since I only have 50 years or so left (if I
am lucky) on this 3rd rock from the Sun, I will have to choose the top 2% of
cool things on my long list and stick to those...

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trapper
There's a startup idea there you know :P

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TriinT
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuselah_Mouse_Prize>

I wish I were a mouse ;-)

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jackdawjack
I've a print copy of this, the content is quite good but rather marred by the
annoying typsetting everything is all jammed in right up to the marigns
(something which is sadly true across this whole series of great books).

The problems however are absolutely fantastic, a great mix of computational
and theoretical which go from half an hours fun to really unanswered problems.
Fun fun fun! I highly recommend trying them and referring to the text as
needed.

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slackenerny
Ehh, memories… I have yet to finish that book.

Dirac said, _“follow mathematical idea wherever it leads”_. When I first
opened ths book years ago, unpublished draft then, I just skimmed the ToC,
checked a few problems and then to my horror encountered that interesting
approach to restricted three–body problem (nicely wrapped as the “Jupiter”
problem in the book). I was horrified because I had a lead on that too… and
there – it's all in textbooks. That situation allowed no relaxed wackiness in
my thinking about it anymore, I had to formulate my thoughts. ‘I need more
math’, I thought. When I finally digged out of that rabbit hole I found myself
learned in dynamical systems, ergodic theory, harmonic analysis, spectral
theory, operator algebras, homology, algebraic topology, and constructive
renormalization, and in numerical methods, symbolic dynamics, symbolic
algebra, Grobner bases and group cohomology and applied algebraic geometry,
and then Hopf algebra of Connes–Kreimer computable renormalization and, uh,
followed Connes the way up to motivic integration… (ok. ok. I'm done
enumerating now) at which point I lost all interest in physics and turned
mathematician.

All that not to mention intersection of algebra and topology of statistical
mechanics with coding theory and infromation theory which led me to machine
learning (which is just statistics btw).

I'm unsure what the moral is. That was not healthy. (OTOH, mathematicians have
high life expectancy, routinely living up to 90, gauging from AMS Notices
obituareis).

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reader5000
Stat mech is basically the math of 'complex systems'. Evolution, neural
processes, economics --- it's all coming out as stat mech in one way or
another. Thus familiarity with stat mech is important if you have any interest
in these areas.

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profquail
Nothing like a little light reading before bed ;)

/math guy

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TriinT
Give this one a try, too:

<http://www.stanford.edu/~montanar/BOOK/book.html>

