Joseph Rudnick earned his PhD in 1970. He has held faculty positions at Tufts University and the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has held a visiting position at Harvard University. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles.
George Gaspari has been a Research Associate at the University of Rochester and has held visiting positions at the University of Bristol, UK, Stanford University and the University of California, Los Angeles. He has been a Sloan Foundation Fellow.
Preface
1. Introduction to techniques
2. Generating functions I
3. Generating functions II: recurrence, sites visited, and the role of dimensionality
4. Boundary conditions, steady state, and the electrostatic analogy
5. Variations on the random walk
6. The shape of a random walk
7. Path integrals and self-avoidance
8. Properties of the random walk: introduction to scaling
9. Scaling of walks and critical phenomena
10. Walks and the O(n) model: mean field theory and spin waves
11. Scaling, fractals, and renormalization
12. More on the renormalization group
References
Index.
