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Preface

This bookismeant forstudents and researchers ready to plunge into
statistical physics, orinto computing, orboth.It has grown out ofmy
research experience, and out ofcourses that I havehad the goodfortune
to give, over the years, to beginning graduate students at the Ecole Nor-
male Sup´erieure and the Universities ofParis VI and VII,and also to
summer school students in Drakensberg, South Africa, undergraduates
in Salem, Germany,theorists and experimentalists in Lausanne, Switzer-
land, young physicists in Shanghai, China, among others.Hundreds of
students frommany different walks of life, with quite different back-
grounds, listened tolectures and tried tounderstand, made comments,
corrected me, and in short helped shape what has now been written
up, for their benefit, and for the benefit ofnew readers that I hope to
attract to this exciting, interdisciplinary field.Manyofthe students sat
downafterwards, by themselves orin groups, to implement short pro-
grams, orto solve other problems.With programming assignments, lack
ofexperience with computers was rarely aproblem: there were always
more knowledgeablestudents around whowouldhelp others with the
first steps in computer programming.Mastering technical coding prob-
lems shouldalsoonly be a secondary problem forreaders ofthis book:
all programs here have been stripped to the bare minimum.None exceed
afew dozen lines ofcode.
Weshall focus onthe concepts ofclassical and quantum statistical
physics and ofcomputing: the meaning ofsampling, random variables,
ergodicity,equidistribution, pressure, temperature, quantum statistical
mechanics, the path integral,enumerations, cluster algorithms, and the
connections between algorithmic complexity and analytic solutions, to
name butafew. These concepts built the backbone ofmy courses, and
now form the tissue ofthe book.I hope that the simple language and
the concrete settings chosen throughout the chapters take away none of
the beauty,and only add to the clarity, of the difficult and profound
subject of statistical physics.
I also hope that readers will feel challenged to implement manyof
the programs.Writing and debugging computer code, even for the naive
programs, remains a difficult task, especially in the beginning, butitis
certainly asuccessful strategy for learning, and for approaching the deep
understanding that wemust reach before we can translate the lessons of
the past intoour own research ideas.
This bookis accompanied by acompact disc containing more than one
hundred pseudocode programs and close to 300 figures, line drawings,