Introduction

Kinetic theory is defined as a branch of statistical mechanics that attempts to describe the non-equilibrium properties of macroscopic systems in terms of microscopic properties of the constituent particles or quantum excitations. The history of kinetic theory is summarized from the first understandings of the connections of temperature and pressure of perfect gases with their average kinetic energy and with the average momentum transfer to the walls by particle-wall collisions. The history continues with a discussion of the contributions of Maxwell and Boltzmann, and the development of the Boltzmann transport equation. Modern developments include extending the Boltzmann equation to moderately dense gases, formulation of kinetic theory for hard sphere systems, discovery of long time tail contributions to the Green-Kubo expressions for transport coefficients, applications of kinetic theory to fluctuations in gases, to quantum gases and to granular particles. The contents of each chapter are then summarized.