Are You Looking for a Unified and Concise Approach to Teaching and Learning the Structure of Materials? Allen and Thomas present information in a manner consistent with the way future scientists and engineers will be required to think about materials' selection, design, and use. Students will learn the fundamentals of three different states of condensed matter-glasses, crystals, and liquid crystals-and develop a set of tools for describing all of them. Above all, they'll gain a better understanding of the principles of structure common to all materials. Key concepts, such as symmetry theory, are introduced and applied to provide a common viewpoint for describing structures of ceramic, metallic, and polymeric materials. Structure-sensitive properties of real materials are introduced. The text also includes a variety of worked example problems. Other texts available in the MIT Series: Thermodynamics of Materials, Vol I, Ragone, 30885-4 Thermodynamics of Materials, Vol II: Kinetics, Ragone, 30886-2 Physical Ceramics: Principles for Ceramics Science and Engineering, Chiang, Birnie, Kingery, 59873-9 Electronic Properties of Engineering Materials, Livingston, 31627-X