Physical Chemistry Essentials

This textbook covers the fundamentals of physical chemistry, explaining the concepts in an accessible way and guiding the readers in a step-by-step manner. The contents are broadly divided into two sections: the classical physico-chemical topics (thermodynamics, kinetics, electrochemistry, transport, and catalysis), and the fabric of matter and its interactions with radiation. Particular care has been taken in the presentation of the algebraic parts of physico-chemical concepts, so that the readers can easily follow the explanations and re-work relevant discussion and derivations with pen and paper. The book is accompanied by a rich mathematical appendix. Each chapter includes a selection of (numerical) exercises and problems, so that students can practice and apply the learned topics. An appendix with solutions allows for controlling the learning success. Carefully prepared illustrative color images make this book a great support for teaching physical chemistry to undergraduate students.

Andreas Hofmann is the Structural Chemistry Program Leader at Griffith University’s Eskitis Institute and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Faculty of Veterinary and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He received his Chemistry Diploma from the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, and his PhD in natural sciences from the Technical University Munich. Following postdoctoral education at the NIH in Frederick, Maryland, USA, he took up a lectureship in Structural Biochemistry at the University of Edinburgh. In 2006, he accepted the position as Associate Professor at Griffith University. His research focuses on the structure and function of proteins in infectious and neurodegenerative diseases with a special interest in protein crystallography, biophysical methods as well as chemo- and bioinformatics. Among other prizes, he won the EULAR Young Investigator Award in 2004, and holds a Fellowship by the Higher Education Academy (UK). Prof. Hofmann has extensive experience in teaching life science students, mainly in physical and analytical chemistry, spectroscopic and molecular analysis, but also bioinformatics and structural biochemistry. He is course convenor and lecturer on “Physical & Analytical Chemistry” at Griffith University. The present textbook is based on his rich teaching experiences and designed to meet the needs of students interested in an introductory text to physical chemistry.