Physics, in regards to life phenomenon, plays important roles in understanding fundamentals of life phenomenon quantatively and in providing the steppingstone for the applications in biotechnology, biomaterial, and medicine. However, albeit its importance and possibilities, physics research in the life phenomenon area is considered to be in the quickening period because of the complexities of biosystems that disables appropriate statistical physics curriculum to be held, hampering students from approaching the statistical physics field.

An emeritus professor at POSTECH, Professor Sung Wo-kyung (PHYS), has recently written the world’s first graduate textbook in statistical physics, titled Statistical Physics for Biological Matter, as a part of a series of ‘Graduate Texts in Physics’ by a global publisher, Springer.

For a Korean scholar to write a graduate textbook regarding a major subject or cutting-edge subject in English and to publish it through a global publisher is a highly unique event. The textbook is based on Prof. Sung’s lectures at POSTECH and handles malleable material, fluid phenomena, magnetic alignment, emergence phenomena that takes place in cellular level or macromolecule level of an organism.