Time:
MWF 9:25 - 10:15
There are two Friday class meeting times that will be rescheduled:
February 12th and February 19th.
Location:
141 DeBartolo Hall
Professor:
Dan Gezelter
phone: 631-7595
office: 258 Stepan Chemistry
e-mail: gezelter@nd.edu
Office hours: Whenever my office door is open and I’m not otherwise occupied
Texts:
Introduction to Modern Statistical Mechanics, by David Chandler
Statistical Mechanics, by Donald A. McQuarrie
These should be relatively easy to find at online vendors.
Grade:
| Problem Sets (roughly bi-weekly): | 40% |
| Open-book take-home Final: | 20% |
| Computational Projects: | 35% |
| Class participation & attendance: | 5% |
Other:
Students are bound by Notre Dame’s graduate Honor Code. Group work is allowed except for exams. The take-home final must be done completely independently.
One note about group work: Statistical Mechanics deals with some intellectually challenging material. The only way to learn the subject is to actually do the problems on your own without consulting the internet. 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 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 Sakai and on the problem set web page as they are released.
Class Notes:
I’ll be posting the class notes as we complete a logical section (roughly every 2 weeks) on the notes web page each week.