In recent years statistical physics has made significant progress as a result of advances in numerical techniques. While good textbooks exist on the general aspects of statistical physics, the numerical methods and the new developments based on large-scale computing are not usually adequately presented. In this book 16 experts describe the application of methods of statistical physics to various areas in physics such as disordered materials, quasicrystals, semiconductors, and also to other areas beyond physics, such as financial markets, game theory, evolution, and traffic planning, in which statistical physics has recently become significant. In this way the universality of the underlying concepts and methods such as fractals, random matrix theory, time series, neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, becomes clear. The topics are covered by introductory, tutorial presentations.

Gathering research from physics, mechanical engineering, and statistics in a single resource for the first time, this text presents the background to the model, its theoretical basis, and applications ranging from materials science to earth science. The authors start by explaining why disorder is important for fracture and then go on to introduce the fiber bundle model, backed by various different applications. Appendices present the necessary mathematical, computational and statistical background required. The structure of the book allows the reader to skip some material that is too specialized, making this topic accessible to the engineering, mechanics and materials science communities, in addition to providing further reading for graduate students in statistical physics.

This book is about computational methods based on operator splitting. It consists of twenty-three chapters written by recognized splitting method contributors and practitioners, and covers a vast spectrum of topics and application areas, including computational mechanics, computational physics, image processing, wireless communication, nonlinear optics, and finance. Therefore, the book presents very versatile aspects of splitting methods and their applications, motivating the cross-fertilization of ideas.

The Physics of Information Technology explores the familiar devices that we use to collect, transform, transmit, and interact with electronic information. Many such devices operate surprisingly close to very many fundamental physical limits. Understanding how such devices work, and how they can (and cannot) be improved, requires deep insight into the character of physical law as well as engineering practice. The book starts with an introduction to units, forces, and the probabilistic foundations of noise and signalling, then progresses through the electromagnetics of wired and wireless communications, and the quantum mechanics of electronic, optical, and magnetic materials, to discussions of mechanisms for computation, storage, sensing, and display. This self-contained volume will help both physical scientists and computer scientists see beyond the conventional division between hardware and software to understand the implications of physical theory for information manipulation.

A panorama of new ideas in mathematics that are driving innovation in computing and communications.

During the past 20 years, solid state physics has become one of the major branches of physics. 1-2 Today over one-third of all scientific articles published in physics deal with solid state 3 topics. During the last two decades, there has also been ra~id growth of scientific computation in a wide variety of fields. -5 The combination of solid state physics and comp~tation may be termed computational solid state physics. This emerging field is distin guished from theoretical solid state physics only to the extent that electronic computers rather than slide rules or backs of envelopes are used to solve numerical or logical problems, test scientific hypotheses, and discover the essential physical content of formal mathematical theories. Papers in computational solid state physics are widely scatter ed in the literature. They can be found in the traditional physics journals and review series, such as The Physical Review and Solid State Physics; in more specialized publications, such as Journal of Computational Physics, Computer Physics Communications, and Methods in Computational Physics; and in the proceedings of a number of re 6 9 cent conferences and seminar courses. - Plans for holding an International Symposium on Computational Solid State Physics in early October 1971 were formulated by Dr.