Customer Reviews

Physical Chemistry: Statistical Mechanics

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I was a TA for an undergraduate quantum mechanics class that used this book. It provides a more modern approach to solving problems using Mathematica. Its use of Mathematica to solve problems had major advantages and disadvantages. It allowed for students to solve problems that they otherwise would not have been able to do, and required them to develop some computational skills that will be useful to them in the future (I have had to learn several different programming languages in my graduate work). However, learning both Mathematica and Quantum Mechanics simultaneously proved to be quite a task, and I fear that some of the meaning in both was lost. Metiu provides great examples of how to solve problems for each chapter in the Workbook CD that accompanys the text. I doubt if everybody would have been able to make much progress on HW problems without these examples. In many instances the code Metiu provided was used to solve similar HW problems without much knowledge of how the programs worked, and in others, his examples were followed without knowing what was being solved. This book seems very distinct from others as Metiu describes QM much differently than other introductory works, and provides important details that other books completely omit. I enjoyed his approach which helped me to understand better. This book would be great for an advanced (honors) undergraduate class, one that already has some experience with solving problems with computers, or one that is able to schedule a weekly tutorial time to go over problems using Mathematica, otherwise another text may be best. It is newly released so there are some errors but nothing major.