"The material published in this volume comes essentially from a course given at the Conference on "Boltzmann equation and fluidodynamic limits", held in Trieste in June 2006." -- preface.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1964.

The idea for this book was conceived by the authors some time in 1988, and a first outline of the manuscript was drawn up during a summer school on mathematical physics held in Ravello in September 1988, where all three of us were present as lecturers or organizers. The project was in some sense inherited from our friend Marvin Shinbrot, who had planned a book about recent progress for the Boltzmann equation, but, due to his untimely death in 1987, never got to do it. When we drew up the first outline, we could not anticipate how long the actual writing would stretch out. Our ambitions were high: We wanted to cover the modern mathematical theory of the Boltzmann equation, with rigorous proofs, in a complete and readable volume. As the years progressed, we withdrew to some degree from this first ambition- there was just too much material, too scattered, sometimes incomplete, sometimes not rigor ous enough. However, in the writing process itself, the need for the book became ever more apparent. The last twenty years have seen an amazing number of significant results in the field, many of them published in incom plete form, sometimes in obscure places, and sometimes without technical details. We made it our objective to collect these results, classify them, and present them as best we could. The choice of topics remains, of course, subjective.

This book covers classical kinetic theory of gases, presenting basic principles in a self-contained framework and from a more rigorous approach based on the Boltzmann equation. Uses methods in kinetic theory for determining the transport coefficients of gases.

The Old Quantum Theory explains how the classical laws were modified by Planck, Einstein, Rutherford, Bohr, and other contributors to account for atomic phenomena, comprising the development of quantum theory from its start at the very end of the 19th century until the beginning of the 20th century. This book begins by discussing Planck's discovery of his radiation law, followed by Einstein's introduction to quanta. Next is a description of the Rutherford model of the atom and Bohr's postulates, which are confirmed by the Franck-Hertz experiment. This selection concludes with a description of how Bohr's theory could explain the main features of the atomic spectra. A brief summary of other important developments in the period are also elaborated. This publication is beneficial to students and researchers conducting work on the history of quantum mechanics from the 1900s to the development of wave mechanics.

In recent years kinetic theory has developed in many areas of the physical sciences and engineering, and has extended the borders of its traditional fields of application. This monograph is a self-contained presentation of such recently developed aspects of kinetic theory, as well as a comprehensive account of the fundamentals of the theory. Emphasizing modeling techniques and numerical methods, the book provides a unified treatment of kinetic equations not found in more focused works. Specific applications presented include plasma kinetic models, traffic flow models, granular media models, and coagulation-fragmentation problems. The work may be used for self-study, as a reference text, or in graduate-level courses in kinetic theory and its applications.