Statistical Mechanics Seminar

A metauni seminar I ran in 2023 on statistical mechanics, with a view towards understanding apparent phase transitions in deep learning. The speakers were Rohan Hitchcock and Ben Gerraty.

Talks

• “What Is Statistical Mechanics? Hamiltonian Systems and Liouville’s Theorem.” Rohan Hitchcock. 3 August 2023. notes · video
• “Entropy and the Boltzmann Distribution.” Rohan Hitchcock. 17 August 2023. notes · video
• “Stochastic Processes.” Rohan Hitchcock. 31 August 2023. notes · video
• “Stochastic Differential Equations.” Rohan Hitchcock. 14 September 2023. notes
• On Seung, Sompolinsky and Tishby (1992), “Statistical Mechanics of Learning from Examples.” Rohan Hitchcock. 28 September 2023. notes
• “Statistical Field Theory 1: 1D Ising Model to Spin-1/2, Part 1.” Ben Gerraty. 30 November 2023. notes
• “Statistical Field Theory 1: Introduction and 1D Ising Model to Spin-1/2, Part 2.” Ben Gerraty. 14 December 2023. notes
• “Statistical Field Theory 2: 2D Classical Ising Model to 1D Quantum Ising Model, Part 1.” Ben Gerraty. 18 December 2023. notes

Texts

• R. K. Pathria and P. D. Beale (2011). Statistical Mechanics.
• E. T. Jaynes (1957). “Information Theory and Statistical Mechanics.” Physical Review 106(4), 620–630.
• B. Øksendal (2013). Stochastic Differential Equations.
• J. H. Manton (2013). “A Primer on Stochastic Differential Geometry for Signal Processing.” IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing 7(4), 681–699. arXiv
• H. S. Seung, H. Sompolinsky and N. Tishby (1992). “Statistical Mechanics of Learning from Examples.” Physical Review A 45(8), 6056–6091.