About#

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Statistical Mechanics for Chemistry and Biology#

Description#

  • This website holds content for the course “Chem 563 Statistical Mechanics for Chemistry and Biology” taught during spring semesters at the Deparment of Chemistry at Iowa State University. The course has two major objectives.

  • Provide graduate students in STEM field with a solid theoretical foundation of statistical mechanics.

  • Show how to utilize the variety of powerful computational techniques of statistical mechanics such as Monte Carlo, Molecular Dynamics, Stochastic Processes, Machine Learning techniques.

  • This course is much more application focused. As a result it is different from traditional statistical physics courses taught at chemistry or physics departments.

Prerequisites#

  • No programing expreience is assumed. Python3 and its ecosystem of scientific libraries will be introduced at the beginning of the course in an accessible manner.

  • The only prerequisite is basic working knowledge of Calculus and exposure to Thermodynamics taught in most undergraduate chemistry courses.

Onn using the notebooks#

  • You can read the book on website or download pdf. To get the most out of these notes you should execute code blocks and explore the interactive content in the notebooks. There are several ways to use notebook content:

  • Rune code on Collab. . Google Collab allows you to save notebooks to GoogleDrive, requires no installations and provides some free GPUs and Gemini AI assistant.

  • Rune code on Laptop Requires installing anaconda python distribution and all the required packages. Give you much more flexibility to run and save files.

Feedback#

  • If you find a typo or have a suggestion please open an issue on Github. I would highly appreciate any feedback and contributions.