Introduction
The first few
lectures in this course are devoted to a brief, and fairly low level,
introduction to a branch of mathematics known as probability theory. In
fact, we do not need to know very much about probability theory in order to
understand statistical thermodynamics, since the probabilistic ``calculation''
which underpins all of this subject is extraordinarily simple.
What is probability?
Combining probabilities
The two-state system
Combinatorial analysis
The binomial distribution
The mean, variance, and standard deviation
Application to the binomial distribution
The Gaussian distribution
The central limit theorem
