gems, corundum, chemistry.2, history of gemology, history of crystallography

This book is designed for the first part of a modern course on the physics of solids. It has been written from the author’s lecture notes for the first semester of a three-semester sequence on solids offered by the Physics Department at the University of Illinois. This first course is taken mainly by graduate students who have had an introductory course in quantum mechanics and the standard background of undergraduate physics courses including thermodynamics and elementary statistical mechanics.