This book is a compilation of the review papers, expositions and some of the technical works of Leo P.  Kadanoff. The objetive is to put together a group of not-too-technical writing in which he discusses some issues in condensed matter physics, hydrodynamics, applied mathematics and national policy. This expanded edition is divided into five sections. The first section contains review papers on hydrodynamics, condensed matter physics and field theory. Next is a selection of papers on scaling and universality, particularly as applied to phase transitions. A change of pace is provided by a series of papers on the critical analysis of simulation models of urban economic and social development. The book concludes with a series of recent papers on complex patterns. Each major section has an introduction designed to tie the work together and to provide perspective on the subject matter.

The material presented in this textbook has been tested in two courses. One of these is a graduate-level survey of statistical physics; the other, a rather personal perspective on critical behavior. Thus, this book defines a progresion starting at the book-learning part of graduate education and ending in the midst of topics at the research level. The book presents the classic topics of statistical physics at the graduate level in a clear and concise way. Besides, to supplement the research-level side the book includes some research papers. Several of these are classics in the field, including a suite of six works on self-organized criticality and complexity, a pair on diffusion-limited aggregation, some papers on correlations near critical points, a few of the basic sources on the development of the real-space renormalization group, and several papers on magnetic behavior in a plane geometry. In addition, the author has included a few of his own papers.