Thermoelectricity has a great future and a fantastic potential. There are many applications in numerous areas. The subject is attracting an increasing number of research scientists, development engineers and potential users of thermoelectric equipments.

It is necessary to dominate the physical principles and the processes of thermoelectric energy conversion, to be able to contribute to the progress, to the development and to the use of thermoelectricity.

The first fundamental books on thermoelectricity were written by A.J. Ioffe and H.J. Goldsmid over 30 years ago.

Since then thermoelectricity has evolved, research work has been done and new applications have been developed. It is time to have a new book covering the present state of thermoelectricity.

I am honoured to present this book. It is dedicated to the physics of thermoelectricity. The author Dr. Lukyan I. Anatychuk is an Academician of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and is President of the International Thermoelectric Academy. He is a world specialist in thermoelectricity; he has contributed considerably to the physics and to the development of thermoelectricity. Most of the material of this book comes from many years of scientific work done by the author and his colleagues at the Institute of Thermoelectricity.

I first met Dr. Anatychuk in 1990 in Pasadena at the International Conference on Thermoelectrics and I quickly learnt about his work at the Institute of Thermoelectricity in Chernivtsi, it is part of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. He is the founder of this Institute and its Director. It is one of the leading scientific Institutes on Thermoelectricity in the world.

He founded in 1994 the International Thermoelectric Academy and the International Journal of Thermoelectricity. This journal in English publishes many papers by Ukrainian and Russian authors that otherwise would not be accessible to the English speaking world. Certain papers have been integrated into this book.

Several years ago, during a discussion with Dr. Anatychuk, about his 1976 book in Russian, which contains a lot of fundamental knowledge on thermoelectricity, I suggested that it should be translated, perhaps updated and I offered my assistance for the editing.

Dr. Oleg J. Luste and I are co-editors of this book. We wish to acknowledge the work of the initial translators Mrs. T.V. Zybachinskaya and Dr. V.G.Kozyrsky that laid the basis for the English Edition. Dr. Luste deserves all the credit for editing this book. He has worked painstakingly to co-ordinate all the works of the contributors, to the editing of text, graphs and bibliography. He has ensured that the English text corresponds to the author’s manuscript. My contribution has been solely to ensure that the English text is, I hope, understandable to all readers with a working knowledge of English.

I hope that this book, which contains many interesting concepts and new perspectives on the potential of thermoelectricity, will contribute to new discoveries and the development of efficient thermoelectric equipment’s whether they be in electrical power generation or in heat pumps, especially cooling.