This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the kinetic theory of gases for graduate students and interested researchers. The book is based on graduate level courses I taught in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and in the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences of the University of Michigan College of Engineering. These courses were intended to provide a broad introduction to the kinetic theory of gases.

The course on gaskinetic theory and real gas effects has been taught for a long period of time by Professors Thomas C. Adamson, Vi-Cheng Liu, Paul B. Hays, Martin Sichel and others before I was fortunate enough to teach it. I greatly benefited from their experience and lecture notes. The first part of the course (Phasespace distributions, Binary collisions and Elementary transport theory) generally follows the way this course was organized for the last decade or so. The second part is significantly revised and concentrates on the fundamentals of advanced transport theory. Although the course starts at a very elementary level, Chapters 5 and 6 are quite advanced.

This course was intended to provide a comprehensive background for students who eventually intend to carry out independent research in computational fluid dynamics, aerodynamics of high altitude flight, upper atmospheric science, planetary atmospheres and space physics. The reader is expected to have some familiarity with integral calculus, vector and tensor algebra, statistics and classical mechanics.