Siddhartha Sen

Colonizing, Decolonizing, and Globalizing Kolkata offers an extended analysis of the architecture and urban planning of Kolkata from the earliest days of colonialism through independence and on into the twenty-first century, all set in the larger context of Indian cities' architecture and urban planning. What Siddhartha Sen shows is the transformation of a colonial city into a Marxist one — and ongoing attempts to further transform Kolkata into a global city. Richly illustrated, the book carefully situates architecture, design, and urban planning within Kolkata's political economy and social milieu.

Colonizing, Decolonizing, and Globalizing Kolkata offers an extended analysis of the architecture and urban planning of Kolkata from the earliest days of colonialism through independence and on into the twenty-first century, all set in the larger context of Indian cities’ architecture and urban planning. What Siddhartha Sen shows is the transformation of a colonial city into a Marxist one — and ongoing attempts to further transform Kolkata into a global city. Richly illustrated, the book carefully situates architecture, design, and urban planning within Kolkata’s political economy and social milieu.

The book explains concepts and ideas of mathematics and physics that are relevant for advanced students and researchers of condensed matter physics. With this aim, a brief intuitive introduction to many-body theory is given as a powerful qualitative tool for understanding complex systems. The important emergent concept of a quasiparticle is then introduced as a way to reduce a many-body problem to a single particle quantum problem. Examples of quasiparticles in graphene, superconductors, superfluids and in a topological insulator on a superconductor are discussed. The mathematical idea of self-adjoint extension, which allows short distance information to be included in an effective long distance theory through boundary conditions, is introduced through simple examples and then applied extensively to analyse and predict new physical consequences for graphene. The mathematical discipline of topology is introduced in an intuitive way and is then combined with the methods of differential geometry to show how the emergence of gapless states can be understood. Practical ways of carrying out topological calculations are described.

This 2006 textbook provides a concise introduction to the key concepts and tools of statistical mechanics. It also covers advanced topics such as non-relativistic quantum field theory and numerical methods. After introducing classical analytical techniques, such as cluster expansion and Landau theory, the authors present important numerical methods with applications to magnetic systems, Lennard-Jones fluids and biophysics. Quantum statistical mechanics is discussed in detail and applied to Bose-Einstein condensation and topics in astrophysics and cosmology. In order to describe emergent phenomena in interacting quantum systems, canonical non-relativistic quantum field theory is introduced and then reformulated in terms of Feynman integrals. Combining the authors' many years' experience of teaching courses in this area, this textbook is ideal for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in physics, chemistry and mathematics.