About#

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Statistical Mechanics for Chemistry and Biology#

This website hosts jupyter notebooks containing lectures notes and computational content for the “Chem 563 Statistical Mechanics” course, taught at the Department of Chemistry of Iowa State University. The course has two major objectives.

  • Firstly to provide PhD students in STEM field with a solid theoretical foundation of statistical mechanics.

    • The only pre-requiestes are having taken standard physical-chemistry which assumes basic knowledge of thermodynamics, kinetics and calculus.

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

    • All the examples and applications are primarily inspired from chemistry, materials science and biology problems and as such this course is different in its choice of materials compared to traditional statistical physics courses taught at chemistry departments.

    • 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.

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:

  • Open notebooks in the cloud (preferred). . Google Collab allows you to save notebooks to GoogleDrive, requires no installations and provides some free GPUs for simulations and machine learning exercises!

  • Open locally in jupyter notebook/lab (advanced users) Requires installing anaconda python distribution and all the required packages which can be found on github repository.

Comments? Questions?

For feedback, corrections go to the Github page of the course, open an issue and leave your comments, questions and suggestions. I would highly appreciate any feedback and contributions. If you are interested in contributing to the developent of the course please get in touch. I would love to have more people engaged in bettering the course and reaching out to wider scientific and engineering community.