Richard C. Tolman

Referred to by every later author, used by thousands of students in the over forty years since publication, and recommended with great enthusiasm by those same students who are now professors, The Principles of Statistical Mechanics is widely recognized as the classic treatment of a subject essential to contemporary physics. It is the definitive treatise on the fundamentals of statistical mechanics, and because it deals with the fundamentals, the material is as useful today as forty years ago.