Statistical Physics On The Eve Of The 21st Century: In Honour Of J B Mcguire On The Occasion Of His 65th Birthday

Book excerpt: This volume is a collection of original papers and reviews in honour of James McGuire, one of the pioneers of integrable models in statistical physics. The broad range of articles offers a timely perspective on the current status of statistical mechanics, identifying both recent results as well as future challenges. The work contains a number of overviews of standard topics such as exactly solved lattice models and their various applications in statistical physics, from models of strongly correlated electrons to the conformational properties of polymer chains. It is equally wide ranging in its coverage of new directions and developing fields including quantum computers, financial markets, chaotic systems, Feigenbaum scaling, proteins, brain behaviour, immunology, Markov superposition, Bose-Einstein condensation, random matrices, exclusion statistics, vertex operator algebras and D-unsolvability.The level of coverage is appropriate for graduate students. It will be equally of interest to professional physicists who want to learn about progress in statistical physics in recent years. Experts will find this work useful because of its broad sweep of topics and its discussion of remaining unsolved problems.