Exactly Solved Models ─ A Journey in Statistical Mechanics, Selected Papers With Commentaries 1963-2008

Fa Yueh Wu (Northeastern U.) found statistical mechanics at the beginning of his career 40 years ago, and he began a career of multifaceted enduring contributions to the field, which at that time was in a burgeoning stage of development. The field has now branched out to other areas of physics and science, and those seeking a toehold have a harder time. In response to this dilemma, Wu offers graduate students this book with a twofold purpose: it introduces exactly solvable models and their role outside of traditional statistical mechanics, and it collects and organizes by theme some of Wu's pedagogical papers written over the years. He provides commentaries to introduce each topic, which include Dimer statistics, duality and gauge transformations, the Ising model, the Potts model, critical frontiers, percolation, graph theory, and knot invariants. Culminating the book is a contributed chapter reviewing Wu's contributions in lattice statistical mechanics, solid state physics, graph theory, and enumerative combinatorics, among other domains. Annotation c2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)