This is an introductory text that aims to provide students with a background and skill essential to study and understand time dependent (relaxation) phenomena. It will allow students to calculate transport properties like diffusion and conductivity.

Biman Bagchi is currently holding an India National Science Chair (DST-SERB) & Honorary Professorship at the Solid State and Structural Chemistry Unit (SSCU), Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. He obtained his B.Sc. degree from the Presidential College, Calcutta and M.Sc. from Science College, Calcutta University. He received PhD from Brown University, RI, in 1981 and carried out postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago and University of Maryland, before returning to India in 1984 to join the Indian Institute of Science. He is a Fellow of all the three National Science Academies of India. He an elected Fellow of the third world academy of sciences (TWAS) and Elected Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2020) [AAA&S]. He received a fair number of Awards in India including an early Bhatnagar (at 36 years of age), GD Birla, Goyal Prizes. He received International TWAS Prize in 1998. He is the recipient of the 2021 Joel Henry Hildebrand ACS National Award from the American Chemical Society in Theoretical and Experimental Chemistry of Liquids and also the prestigious Humboldt Science Research Award of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2019). J. Physical Chemistry brought out a Festschrift special issue J. Phys. Chem. B, 2015, Vol.: 119, in his honour. Bagchi has published more than 500 papers including 26 reviews, authored three books on different aspects of statistical mechanics and currently writing a 4th book on nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. He has also published two non-technical books (mostly for students) available on Amazon Kindle.