ABSTRACT
This chapter helps students with the concepts of probabilities and statistics to understand physical chemical principles and to analyze complex problems in chemical and biothermodynamics. It focuses on events, outcomes, and their combinations. The chapter develops the concept of the probability distribution as a collection of probabilities for all possible outcomes. It emphasizes the differences between specific sequences of elementary events, and collections composed of specific sequences that share some overall property. The chapter reviews the basic concepts of probabilities and the distributions that govern them. It describes how to derive various average quantities from probability distributions; such derivations provide a means to directly test and refines statistical thermodynamic models and learn about molecular systems. Probably the most important discrete distribution in statistical thermodynamics is the binomial distribution. The exponential decay distribution is used to describe energy distributions in molecular systems with a large number of molecules.
