Kugel, Weiner publish article in chemical education journal

In an example of interdisciplinary collaboration, Roger Kugel, Chemistry Department, and Paul Weiner, Mathematics and Statistics Department, have co-authored an article that appeared this week in the Journal of Chemical Education (web edition). The paper, titled, “Energy Distributions in Small Populations: Pascal versus Boltzmann,” describes a novel way to compute how energy distributes among a small number of molecules. The study promises to have a direct impact on student learning regarding the important concept of energy distribution, and could lead to new insights into the molecular energetics of real nanoscale systems.

The article can be viewed at http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ed1003838. A print edition of the paper will appear in the November issue of this journal.