Since the middle of the twentieth century, the traditional picture of entropy as a measure of disorder has shifted. However, this development is not well known outside the Statistical Mechanics community. In my talk, I will discuss examples where entropy increases with increasing order, I will briefly touch on Gibbs’ paradox and I will discuss how recently developed numerical tools allow us to compute close and distant relatives of Boltzmann’s entropy.
Daan Frenkel is a Dutch computational physicist in the Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge. His research has focused on the numerical simulation of many-body systems, with a special emphasis on problems relating to ordering and self-assembly in soft matter. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (1998), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2008), and TWAS(2012). He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 2006. In 2016 he was elected as a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2010 he received the Soft Matter and Biophysical Chemistry Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry, UK. He received the 2016 Boltzmann Medal. Asteroid 12651 Frenkel, discovered by astronomers during the third Palomar–Leiden trojan survey in 1977, was named in his honor in 2018.