Monte Carlo Methods in Statistical Mechanics: Foundations and New Algorithms Note to the Reader

These notes are an updated version of lectures given at the Cours de Troisi eme Cycle de la Physique en Suisse Romande (Lausanne, Switzerland) in June 1989. We thank the Troisi eme Cycle de la Physique en Suisse Romande and Professor Michel Droz for kindly giving permission to reprint these notes. The following notes are based on my course \Monte Carlo Methods in Statistical Mechanics: Foundations and New Algorithms" given at the Cours de Troisi eme Cycle de la Physique en Suisse Romande (Lausanne, Switzerland) in June 1989, and on my course \Multi-Grid Monte Carlo for Lattice Field Theories" given at the Winter College on Multilevel Techniques in Computational Physics (Trieste, Italy) in January{February 1991. The reader is warned that some of this material is out-of-date (this is particularly true as regards reports of numerical work). For lack of time, I have made no attempt to update the text, but I have added footnotes marked \Note Added 1996" that correct a few errors and give additional bibliography. My rst two lectures at Carg ese 1996 were based on the material included here. My third lecture described the new nite-size-scaling extrapolation