Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

With the tremendous array of experimental tools available today to scientists and engineers for studying the structure of materials, structural arrangements for crystalline and noncrystalline materials, and liquid crystals can be described with great accuracy. This book specializes in the structure of materials, and focuses solely on the three different states of solid condensed matter-glasses, crystals, and liquid crystals-and develop a set of tools for describing all of them. Treatment includes glasses, crystals, liquid crystals, imperfections in ordered media, and microstructure. This book uses a more concise and consistent approach with the way materials scientists and engineers need to think about materials in order to select them and use them to their best advantage.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• The Structure of Materials: Overview
• Noncrystalline State
• Crystalline State
• Liquid-Crystalline State
• Imperfections in Ordered Media
• Microstructure
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

The basic philosophy of materials science, as a discipline, is that the macroscopic properties of solid state materials are dependent on the structure at atomic and microscopic levels. Allen and Thomas share that philosophy to an extent, but their book represents a departure from the way most undergraduate books on materials science are organized. Instead of discussing each class of material in turn, according to this philosophy, the book merges various classes of materials into a new kind of (super)class, based on their somewhat unconventional structures as crystalline, liquid-crystalline, and noncrystalline. The authors have experimented with the course outlined in this book for the past ten years at MIT. To what extent this approach is better than that of other instructors at other institutions is hard to measure. This book, in that sense, is "futuristic." But no doubt it is a novel--and, hopefully, a fruitful--innovation. After a brief review of general principles in the first chapter, the next five chapters discuss structures, wherein many up-to-date techniques and notions are presented. Recommended as a supplementary or optional work for undergraduates. K. Srinagesh; University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

Author notes provided by Syndetics

SAMUEL M. ALLEN is Professor of Physical Metallurgy in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at M.I.T. He earned a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Stevens Institute of Technology and an S.M. and a Ph.D. from M.I.T. His research interests include phase transformations, solid/solid interfaces, structure/property relations in high-temperature alloys, three-dimensional printing of metal tools for plastic injection molding, and alloys for high-strain actuators. He is also co-authoring a graduate textbook, "Kinetic Processes in Materials," with Robert W. Balluffi and W. Craig Carter.

EDWIN L. THOMAS is the Morris Cohen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at M.I.T. He received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts and a Ph.D. in Materials Science from Cornell University. His research interests include processing, microstructure and mechanical property relations of polymers, and optical properties of liquid crystals and polymeric-based photonic band gap materials. Professor Thomas' honors and awards include the High Polymer Physics Prize of the American Physical Society and the American Chemical Society Creative Polymer Chemist Award.