Motivation and Set-Up

Statistical mechanics can feel mysterious and abstract. I’m creating resources to hopefully make the concepts that we cover in class more clear, more concrete, and less confusing.

This website and the accompanying PDF course notes are written using Quarto, an open-source publishing framework. Quarto allows me to (relatively) easily include math, visualizations, and even simple simulations in what I write. Quarto outputs are also (mostly) accessible, though accessible PDF support notably isn’t perfect.

Where I need to perform calculations, make visualizations, etc., I’m using the Julia programming language. This is the same language used for the Pluto.jl notebooks (which have basically the same content as these Quarto notes, but with dynamic visualizations) and the language that I’ve used for the continuous assessment exercise on the two-dimensional Ising model that you’ll be completing later on. If you want a more interactive resource, check out the Pluto.jl notebooks here; these require you to install and run Julia, so read the guide I’ve posted on Brightspace (and here).

My aim is to illustrate some important concepts that will be helpful to you even if you do not know how to program (in Julia or any other programming language). For this reason, I’ve hidden all code by default. If you’re interested and want to understand better what’s going on, you can click the buttons marked “▶ code”. Reading the source code could help you if you’re interested in learning Julia or engaging more with scientific programming. I’ve tried to provide helpful documentation, but if any of the code is confusing, please let me know!

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