Josiah Willard Gibbs - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia

J.
Willard Gibbs
Josiah Willard Gibbs
Born
February 11, 1839
New Haven, Connecticut
Died
April 28, 1903 (aged 64)
New Haven, Connecticut
Residence
United States
Fields
Physics, chemistry, mathematics
Institutions
Yale University
Alma mater
Yale
Doctoral
advisor
Hubert Anson Newton
Doctoral
students
Edwin Bidwell Wilson, Irving
Fisher, Henry Andrews Bumstead,
Lynde Wheeler, Lee De Forest
Known for
Statistical mechanics
Statistical ensemble
Gibbs entropy
Phase space
Gibbs free energy
Phase rule
Gibbs paradox
Vector calculus
Cross product
Gibbs phenomenon
GibbsHelmholtz equation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Josiah Willard Gibbs (February 11, 1839 April 28, 1903)
was an American scientist who made important theoretical
contributions to physics, chemistry, and mathematics. His
work on the applications of thermodynamics was
instrumental in transforming physical chemistry into a
rigorous deductive science. Together with James Clerk
Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann, he created statistical
mechanics (a term that he coined), explaining the laws of
thermodynamics as consequences of the statistical properties
of large ensembles of particles. Gibbs also worked on the
application of Maxwell's equations to problems in physical
optics. As a mathematician, he invented modern vector
calculus (independently of the British scientist Oliver
Heaviside, who carried out similar work during the same
period).
In 1863, Yale awarded Gibbs the first American doctorate in
engineering. After a three-year sojourn in Europe, Gibbs
spent the rest of his career at Yale, where he was professor of
mathematical physics from 1871 until his death. Working in
relative isolation, he became the earliest theoretical scientist
in the United States to earn an international reputation and
was praised by Albert Einstein as "the greatest mind in
American history".
[1]
In 1901 Gibbs received what was then
considered the highest honor awarded by the international
scientific community, the Copley Medal of the Royal Society
of London,
[1]
"for his contributions to mathematical
physics".
[2]
Commentators and biographers have remarked on the
contrast between Gibbs's quiet, solitary life in turn of the
century New England and the great international impact of
his ideas. Though his work was almost entirely theoretical,
the practical value of Gibbs's contributions became evident
with the development of industrial chemistry during the first
half of the 20th century. According to Robert A. Millikan, in
pure science Gibbs "did for statistical mechanics and for
thermodynamics what Laplace did for celestial mechanics
and Maxwell did for electrodynamics, namely, made his field
a well-nigh finished theoretical structure."
[3]
Josiah Willard Gibbs - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_Willard_Gibbs
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GibbsDuhem equation
Gibbs algorithm
Gibbs measure
Gibbs state
GibbsThomson effect
Gibbs isotherm
GibbsDonnan effect
GibbsMarangoni effect
Gibbs lemma
Gibbs' inequality
Influences
Rudolf Clausius, Hermann
Grassmann, James Clerk Maxwell,
Ludwig Boltzmann
Notable
awards
Rumford Prize (1880), Copley
Medal (1901)
Signature
1 Biography
1.1 Family background
1.2 Early years
1.3 Middle years
1.4 Later years
1.5 Personal life and character
2 Major scientific contributions
2.1 Chemical thermodynamics
2.2 Statistical mechanics
2.3 Vector analysis
2.4 Physical optics
3 Scientific recognition
4 Influence
5 Commemoration
5.1 In literature
5.2 Gibbs stamp (2005)
6 Outline of principal work
7 See also
8 References
9 Bibliography
9.1 Primary
9.2 Secondary
10 External links
Family background
Gibbs belonged to an old Yankee family that had produced distinguished American clergymen and academics
since the 17th century. He was the fourth of five children and the only son of Josiah Willard Gibbs and his wife
Mary Anna, ne Van Cleve. On his father's side, he was descended from Samuel Willard, who served as acting
President of Harvard College from 1701 to 1707. On his mother's side, one of his ancestors was the Rev.
Jonathan Dickinson, the first president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University). Gibbs's given
name, which he shared with his father and several other members of his extended family, derived from his
ancestor Josiah Willard, who had been Secretary of the Province of Massachusetts Bay in the 18th century.
[4]
The elder Gibbs was generally known to his family and colleagues as "Josiah", while the son was called
"Willard".
[5]
Josiah Gibbs was a linguist and theologian who served as professor of sacred literature at Yale
Divinity School from 1824 until his death in 1861. He is chiefly remembered today as the abolitionist who
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Willard Gibbs as a student, circa 1855
Gibbs during his time as a
tutor at Yale
[15]
found an interpreter for the African passengers of the ship Amistad, allowing them to testify during the trial that
followed their rebellion against being sold as slaves.
[6]
Early years
Willard Gibbs was educated at the Hopkins School and entered Yale
College in 1854, aged 15. He graduated in 1858 near the top of his class,
and was awarded prizes for excellence in mathematics and Latin.
[7]
He
remained at Yale as a graduate student at the Sheffield Scientific School.
At age 19, soon after his graduation from college, Gibbs was inducted
into the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, a scholarly
institution composed primarily of members of the Yale faculty.
[8]
Relatively few documents from the period survive and it is impossible to
reconstruct the details of Gibbs's early career with precision.
[9]
In the
opinion of biographers, Gibbs's principal mentor and champion, both at
Yale and in the Connecticut Academy, was probably the astronomer and
mathematician Hubert Anson Newton, a leading authority on meteors,
who remained Gibbs's lifelong friend and confidant.
[8][9]
After the death
of his father in 1861, Gibbs inherited enough money to make him
financially independent.
[10]
Recurrent pulmonary trouble ailed the young Gibbs and his doctors were concerned that he might be susceptible
to tuberculosis, which had killed his mother.
[9]
He also suffered from astigmatism, whose treatment was then
still largely unfamiliar to oculists, so that Gibbs had to diagnose himself and grind his own lenses.
[11][12]
Though in later years he used glasses only for reading or other close work,
[11]
Gibbs's delicate health and
imperfect eyesight probably explain why he did not volunteer to fight in the Civil War of 186165.
[13]
He was
not conscripted and he remained at Yale for the duration of the war.
[14]
In 1863, Gibbs received the first Ph.D. degree in engineering granted in the US,
for a thesis entitled "On the Form of the Teeth of Wheels in Spur Gearing", in
which he used geometrical techniques to investigate the optimum design for
gears.
[16]
This was also only the fifth Ph.D. granted in the US in any subject.
[16]
After graduation, Gibbs was appointed as tutor at the College for a term of three
years. During the first two years he taught Latin and during the third "natural
philosophy" (i.e., physics).
[4]
In 1866 he patented a design for a railway
brake
[17]
and read a paper before the Connecticut Academy, entitled "The
Proper Magnitude of the Units of Length", in which he proposed a scheme for
rationalizing the system of units of measurement used in mechanics.
[18]
After his term as tutor ended, Gibbs traveled to Europe with his sisters. They
spent the winter of 186667 in Paris, where Gibbs attended lectures at the
Sorbonne and the Collge de France, given by such distinguished mathematical
scientists as Joseph Liouville and Michel Chasles.
[19]
Having undertaken a
punishing regime of study, Gibbs caught a serious cold and a doctor, fearing tuberculosis, advised him to rest on
the Riviera, where he and his sisters spent several months and where he made a full recovery.
[20]
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Maxwell's sketch of the lines of constant
temperature and pressure, made in
preparation for his construction of a solid
model based on Gibbs's definition of a
thermodynamic surface for water (see
Maxwell's thermodynamic surface)
Moving to Berlin, Gibbs attended the lectures taught by mathematicians Karl Weierstrass and Leopold
Kronecker, as well as by chemist Heinrich Gustav Magnus.
[21]
In August 1867, Gibbs's sister Julia was married
in Berlin to Addison Van Name, who had been Gibbs's classmate at Yale. The newly married couple returned to
New Haven, leaving Gibbs and his sister Anna in Germany.
[22]
In Heidelberg, Gibbs was exposed to the work
of physicists Gustav Kirchhoff and Hermann von Helmholtz, and chemist Robert Bunsen. At the time, German
academics were the leading authorities in the natural sciences, especially chemistry and thermodynamics.
[23]
Gibbs returned to Yale in June 1869 and briefly taught French to engineering students.
[24]
It was probably also
around this time that he worked on a new design for a steam-engine governor, his last significant investigation
in mechanical engineering.
[25][26]
In 1871 he was appointed Professor of Mathematical Physics at Yale, the first
such professorship in the United States. Gibbs, who had independent means and had yet to publish anything,
was assigned to teach graduate students exclusively and was hired without salary.
[27]
Unsalaried teaching
positions were common in German universities, on which the system of graduate scientific instruction at Yale
was then being modeled.
[28]
Middle years
Gibbs published his first work in 1873, at the unusually advanced
age of 34.
[7]
His papers on the geometric representation of
thermodynamic quantities appeared in the Transactions of the
Connecticut Academy. This journal had few readers capable of
understanding Gibbs's work, but he shared reprints with
correspondents in Europe and received an enthusiastic response
from James Clerk Maxwell at Cambridge. Maxwell even made,
with his own hands, a clay model illustrating Gibbs's construct. He
then produced three plaster casts of his model and mailed one to
Gibbs. That cast is on display at the Yale physics department.
[29]
Maxwell included a chapter on Gibbs's work in the next edition of
his Theory of Heat, published in 1875. He explained the usefulness
of Gibbs's graphical methods in a lecture to the Chemical Society of
London and even referred to it in the article on "Diagrams" that he
wrote for the Encyclopdia Britannica.
[30]
Prospects of
collaboration between him and Gibbs were cut short by Maxwell's
early death in 1879, aged 48. The joke later circulated in New
Haven that "only one man lived who could understand Gibbs's
papers. That was Maxwell, and now he is dead."
[31]
Gibbs then extended his thermodynamic analysis to multi-phase
chemical systems (i.e., to systems composed of more than one kind
of matter) and considered a variety of concrete applications. He
described that research in a monograph titled "On the Equilibrium
of Heterogeneous Substances", published by the Connecticut Academy in two parts that appeared respectively
in 1875 and 1878. That work, which covers about three hundred pages and contains exactly seven hundred
numbered mathematical equations,
[32]
begins with a quotation from Rudolf Clausius that expresses what would
later be called the first and second laws of thermodynamics: "The energy of the world is constant. The entropy
of the world tends towards a maximum."
[33]
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Yale's Sloane Physical Laboratory, as it
stood between 1882 and 1931 at the
current location of Jonathan Edwards
College. Gibbs's office was on the
second floor, to the right of the tower in
the picture.
[37]
Gibbs's monograph rigorously and ingeniously applied his thermodynamic techniques to the interpretation of
physico-chemical phenomena, explaining and relating what had previously been a mass of isolated facts and
observations.
[34]
The work has been described as "the Principia of thermodynamics" and as a work of
"practically unlimited scope".
[32]
Wilhelm Ostwald, who translated Gibbs's monograph into German, referred to
Gibbs as the "founder of chemical energetics".
[35]
According to modern commentators,
It is universally recognised that its publication was an event of the first importance in the history of
chemistry ... Nevertheless it was a number of years before its value was generally known, this delay
was due largely to the fact that its mathematical form and rigorous deductive processes make it
difficult reading for anyone, and especially so for students of experimental chemistry whom it most
concerns.
J. J. O'Connor and E. F. Robertson, 1997
[7]
Gibbs continued to work without pay until 1880, when the new Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore,
Maryland offered him a position paying $3,000 per year. In response, Yale offered him an annual salary of
$2,000, which he was content to accept.
[36]
Later years
From 1880 to 1884, Gibbs worked on developing the exterior algebra
of Hermann Grassmann into a vector calculus well-suited to the needs
of physicists. With this object in mind, Gibbs distinguished between
the dot and cross products of two vectors and introduced the concept of
dyadics. Similar work was carried out independently, and at around the
same time, by the British mathematical physicist and engineer Oliver
Heaviside. Gibbs sought to convince other physicists of the
convenience of the vectorial approach over the quaternionic calculus of
William Rowan Hamilton, which was then widely used by British
scientists. This led him, in the early 1890s, to a controversy with Peter
Guthrie Tait and others in the pages of Nature.
[4]
Gibbs's lecture notes on vector calculus were privately printed in 1881
and 1884 for the use of his students, and were later adapted by Edwin
Bidwell Wilson into a textbook, Vector Analysis, published in 1901.
[4]
That book helped to popularize the "del" notation that is widely used
today in electrodynamics and fluid mechanics. In other mathematical
work, he re-discovered the "Gibbs phenomenon" in the theory of
Fourier series (which, unbeknownst to him and to later scholars, had
been described fifty years before by an obscure English mathematician,
Henry Wilbraham).
[38]
From 1882 to 1889, Gibbs wrote five papers on physical optics, in which he investigated birefringence and
other optical phenomena and defended Maxwell's electromagnetic theory of light against the mechanical
theories of Lord Kelvin and others.
[4]
In his work on optics just as much as in his work on thermodynamics,
Gibbs deliberately avoided speculating about the microscopic structure of matter,
[39]
which proved a wise
course in view of the revolutionary developments in quantum mechanics that began around the time of his
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The sine integral function, which
gives the overshoot associated
with the Gibbs phenomenon for
the Fourier series of a step
function on the real line
death.
[40]
Gibbs coined the term statistical mechanics and introduced key concepts in
the corresponding mathematical description of physical systems, including
the notions of chemical potential (1876), statistical ensemble (1878), and
phase space (1902).
[41][42]
Gibbs's derivation of the phenomenological laws
of thermodynamics from the statistical properties of systems with many
particles was presented in his highly-influential textbook Elementary
Principles in Statistical Mechanics, published in 1902, a year before his
death.
[41]
Gibbs's retiring personality and intense focus on his work limited his
accessibility to students. His principal protg was Edwin Bidwell Wilson,
who nonetheless explained that "except in the classroom I saw very little of
Gibbs. He had a way, toward the end of the afternoon, of taking a stroll
about the streets between his study in the old Sloane Laboratory and his homea little exercise between work
and dinnerand one might occasionally come across him at that time."
[43]
Gibbs did supervise the doctoral
thesis on mathematical economics written by Irving Fisher in 1891.
[44]
After Gibbs's death, Fisher financed the
publication of his Collected Works.
[45]
Another distinguished student was Lee De Forest, later a pioneer of radio
technology.
[46]
Gibbs died in New Haven on April 28, 1903, at the age of 64, victim of an acute intestinal obstruction.
[43]
A
funeral was conducted two days later at his home on 121 High Street
[47]
and his body was buried in the nearby
Grove Street Cemetery.
[48]
In May, Yale organized a memorial meeting at the Sloane Laboratory. The eminent
British physicist J. J. Thomson was in attendance and delivered a brief address.
[49]
Personal life and character
Gibbs never married, living all his life in his childhood home with his sister Julia and her husband Addison Van
Name, who was the Yale librarian. Except for his customary summer vacations in the Adirondacks (at Keene
Valley, New York) and later at the White Mountains (in Intervale, New Hampshire),
[51]
his sojourn in Europe in
186669 was almost the only time that Gibbs spent outside New Haven.
[4]
He joined Yale's College Church (a
Congregational church) at the end of his freshman year
[51][52]
and remained a regular attendant for the rest of
his life.
[53]
He generally voted for the Republican candidate in presidential elections, but he supported Grover
Cleveland, a conservative Democrat.
[54]
Otherwise very little is known of his religious or political views, which
he kept to himself.
[53]
Gibbs did not produce a substantial personal correspondence and many of his letters were later lost or
destroyed.
[55]
Beyond the technical writings concerning his research, he published only two other pieces: a brief
obituary for Rudolf Clausius, one of the founders of the mathematical theory of thermodynamics, and a longer
biographical memoir of his mentor at Yale, H. A. Newton.
[56]
In Edward Bidwell Wilson's view,
Gibbs was not an advertiser for personal renown nor a propagandist for science; he was a scholar,
scion of an old scholarly family, living before the days when research had become rsearch ...
Gibbs was not a freak, he had no striking ways, he was a kindly dignified gentleman.
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Photograph taken around 1895.
According to his student Lynde
Wheeler, of the existing portraits this
is the most faithful to Gibbs's kindly
habitual expression.
[50]
E. B. Wilson, 1931
[43]
According to Lynde Wheeler, who had been Gibbs's student at Yale, in
his later years Gibbs
was always neatly dressed, usually wore a felt hat on the street,
and never exhibited any of the physical mannerisms or
eccentricities sometimes thought to be inseparable from genius ...
His manner was cordial without being effusive and conveyed
clearly the innate simplicity and sincerity of his nature.
Lynde Wheeler, 1951
[50]
He was a careful investor and financial manager, and at his death in
1903 his estate was valued at $100,000.
[51]
For many years he served as
trustee, secretary, and treasurer of his alma mater, the Hopkins
School.
[57]
US President Chester A. Arthur appointed him as one of the
commissioners to the National Conference of Electricians, which
convened in Philadelphia in September 1884, and Gibbs presided over
one of its sessions.
[51]
A keen and skilled horseman,
[58]
Gibbs was seen
habitually in New Haven driving his sister's carriage.
[59]
In an obituary
published in the American Journal of Science, Gibbs's former student
Henry A. Bumstead referred to Gibbs's personal character:
Unassuming in manner, genial and kindly in his intercourse with his fellow-men, never showing
impatience or irritation, devoid of personal ambition of the baser sort or of the slightest desire to
exalt himself, he went far toward realizing the ideal of the unselfish, Christian gentleman. In the
minds of those who knew him, the greatness of his intellectual achievements will never
overshadow the beauty and dignity of his life.
H. A. Bumstead, 1903
[4]
Chemical thermodynamics
Gibbs's papers from the 1870s introduced the idea of expressing the internal energy U of a system in terms of
the entropy S, in addition to the usual state-variables of volume V, pressure p, and temperature T.
[41]
He also
introduced the concept of the chemical potential of a given chemical species, defined to be the rate of the
increase in U associated with the increase in the number N of molecules of that species (at constant entropy and
volume). Thus, it was Gibbs who first combined the first and second laws of thermodynamics
[41]
by expressing
the infinitesimal change in the energy of a system in the form:
where the sum in the last term is over the different chemical species. By taking the Legendre transform of this
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Graphical representation of the
free energy of a body, from the
latter of the papers published by
Gibbs in 1873. This shows a plane
of constant volume, passing
through the point A that represents
the body's initial state. The curve
MN is the section of the "surface
of dissipated energy". AD and AE
are, respectively, the energy ()
and entropy () of the initial state.
AB is the "available energy" (now
called the Helmholtz free energy)
and AC the "capacity for entropy"
(i.e., the amount by which the
entropy can be increased without
changing the energy or volume).
expression, he defined the concepts of enthalpy and "free energy", including
what is now known as the "Gibbs free energy" (a thermodynamic potential
which is especially useful to chemists since it determines whether a reaction
will proceed spontaneously at a fixed temperature and pressure). In a
similar way, he also obtained what later came to be known as the
"GibbsDuhem equation".
[34][41]
The publication of the paper "On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous
Substances" (187478) is now regarded as a landmark in the development
of physical chemistry.
[7]
In it, Gibbs developed a rigorous mathematical
theory for various transport phenomena, including adsorption,
electrochemistry, and the Marangoni effect in fluid mixtures.
[34]
He also
formulated the phase rule
for the number F of variables that may be independently controlled in an
equilibrium mixture of C components existing in P phases. Awareness of
this rule led to the widespread use of phase diagrams by chemists.
[60]
Statistical mechanics
Together with James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann, Gibbs
founded "statistical mechanics", a term that he coined to identify the branch
of theoretical physics that accounts for the observed thermodynamic
properties of systems in terms of the statistics of large ensembles of
particles. He introduced the concept of phase space and used it to define the
microcanonical, canonical, and grand canonical ensembles, thus obtaining a
more general formulation of the statistical properties of many-particle
systems than Maxwell and Boltzmann had achieved before him.
[41][42]
According to Henri Poincar, writing in 1904, even though Maxwell and Boltzmann had previously explained
the irreversibility of macroscopic physical processes in probabilistic terms, "the one who has seen it most
clearly, in a book too little read because it is a little difficult to read, is Gibbs, in his Elementary Principles of
Statistical Mechanics."
[61]
Gibbs's analysis of irreversibility, and his formulation of Boltzmann's H-theorem and
of the ergodic hypothesis, were major influences on the mathematical physics of the 20th century.
[40][62]
Gibbs was well aware that the application of the equipartition theorem to large systems of classical particles
failed to explain the measurements of the specific heats of both solids and gases, and he argued that this was
evidence of the danger of basing thermodynamics on "hypotheses about the constitution of matter".
[42]
Gibbs's
own framework for statistical mechanics was so carefully constructed that it could be carried over almost intact
after the discovery that the microscopic laws of nature obey quantum rules, rather than the classical laws known
to Gibbs and to his contemporaries.
[7]
His resolution of the so-called "Gibbs paradox", about the entropy of the
mixing of gases, is now often cited as a prefiguration of the indistinguishability of particles required by
quantum physics.
[63]
Vector analysis
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Diagram showing the
magnitude and direction of the
cross product of two vectors,
in the notation introduced by
Gibbs
A calcite crystal produces birefringence (or
"double refraction") of light, a phenomenon
which Gibbs explained using Maxwell's
equations for electromagnetic phenomena.
British scientists, including Maxwell, had relied on Hamilton's quaternions in
order to express the dynamics of physical quantities, like the electric and
magnetic fields, having both a magnitude and a direction in three-dimensional
space. Gibbs, however, noted that the product of quaternions always had to be
separated into two parts: a one-dimensional (scalar) quantity and a three-
dimensional vector, so that the use of quaternions introduced mathematical
complications and redundancies that could be avoided in the interest of
simplicity and to facilitate teaching. He therefore proposed defining distinct
dot and cross products for pairs of vectors and introduced the now common
notation for them. He was also largely responsible for the development of the
vector calculus techniques still used today in electrodynamics and fluid
mechanics.
While he was working on vector analysis in the late 1870s, Gibbs discovered
that his approach was similar to the one that Grassmann had taken in his
"multiple algebra".
[64]
Gibbs then sought to publicize Grassmann's work, stressing that it was both more general
and historically prior to Hamilton's quaternionic algebra. To establish Grassmann's priority, Gibbs convinced
Grassmann's heirs to seek the publication in Germany of the essay on tides that Grassmann had submitted in
1840 to the faculty at the University of Berlin, in which he had first introduced the notion of what would later
be called a vector space.
[65]
As Gibbs had advocated in the 1880s and 1890s, quaternions were eventually all but abandoned by physicists in
favor of the vectorial approach developed by him and, independently, by Oliver Heaviside. Gibbs applied his
vector methods to the determination of planetary and comet orbits. He also developed the concept of mutually
reciprocal triads of vectors that later proved to be of importance in crystallography.
[66]
Physical optics
Though Gibbs's research on physical optics is less well known
today than his other work, it made a significant contribution to
classical electromagnetism by applying Maxwell's equations to
the theory of optical processes such as birefringence,
dispersion, and optical activity.
[4][39]
In that work, Gibbs
showed that those processes could be accounted for by
Maxwell's equations without any special assumptions about the
microscopic structure of matter or about the nature of the
medium in which electromagnetic waves were supposed to
propagate (the so-called luminiferous ether). Gibbs also
stressed that the absence of a longitudinal electromagnetic
wave, which is needed to account for the observed properties
of light, is automatically guaranteed by Maxwell's equations
(by virtue of what is now called their "gauge invariance"), whereas in mechanical theories of light, such as Lord
Kelvin's, it must be imposed as an ad hoc condition on the properties of the aether.
[39]
In his last paper on physical optics, Gibbs concluded that
it may be said for the electrical theory [of light] that it is not obliged to invent hypotheses, but only
to apply the laws furnished by the science of electricity, and that it is difficult to account for the
coincidences between the electrical and optical properties of media unless we regard the motions of
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Burlington House, site of the Royal Society
of London, in 1873
light as electrical.
J. W. Gibbs, 1889
[4]
Shortly afterwards, the electromagnetic nature of light was demonstrated by the experiments of Heinrich Hertz
in Germany.
[67]
Gibbs worked at a time when there was little tradition of rigorous theoretical science in the United States. His
research was not easily understandable to his students or his colleagues and he made no effort to popularize his
ideas or to simplify their exposition to make them more accessible.
[7]
His seminal work on thermodynamics
was published mostly in the Transactions of the Connecticut Academy, a journal edited by his librarian brother-
in-law, which was little read in the USA and even less so in Europe. When Gibbs submitted his long paper on
the equilibrium of heterogeneous substances to the Academy, both Elias Loomis and H. A. Newton protested
that they did not understand Gibbs's work at all, but they helped to raise the money needed to pay for the
typesetting of the many mathematical symbols in the paper. Several Yale faculty members, as well as business
and professional men in New Haven, contributed funds for that purpose.
[68]
Even though it had been immediately embraced by Maxwell, Gibbs's graphical formulation of the laws of
thermodynamics only came into widespread use in the mid 20th century, with the work of Lszl Tisza and
Herbert Callen.
[69]
According to James Gerald Crowther,
in his later years [Gibbs] was a tall, dignified gentleman, with a healthy stride and ruddy
complexion, performing his share of household chores, approachable and kind (if unintelligible) to
students. Gibbs was highly esteemed by his friends, but American science was too preoccupied
with practical questions to make much use of his profound theoretical work during his lifetime. He
lived out his quiet life at Yale, deeply admired by a few able students but making no immediate
impress on American science commensurate with his genius.
J. G. Crowther, 1937
[7]
On the other hand, Gibbs did receive the major honors then
possible for an academic scientist in the US. He was elected to the
National Academy of Sciences in 1879 and received the 1880
Rumford Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
for his work on chemical thermodynamics.
[70]
He was also
awarded honorary doctorates by Princeton University and
Williams College.
[4]
In Europe, Gibbs was inducted as honorary member of the London
Mathematical Society in 1892 and as a foreign member of the
Royal Society in 1897. He was elected as corresponding member
of the Prussian and French Academies of Science and received
honorary doctorates from the universities of Erlangen and
Christiania (now Oslo).
[4]
The Royal Society further honored Gibbs in 1901 with the Copley Medal, then
regarded as the highest international award in the natural sciences,
[1]
remarking that he had been "the first to
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apply the second law of thermodynamics to the exhaustive discussion of the relation between chemical,
electrical and thermal energy and capacity for external work."
[35]
Gibbs, who remained in New Haven, was
represented at the award ceremony by Commander Richardson Clover, the US naval attach in London.
[71]
In his autobiography, mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota tells of casually browsing the mathematical stacks of
Sterling Library and stumbling on a handwritten mailing list, attached to some of Gibbs's course notes, which
listed over two hundred notable scientists of his day, including Poincar, Boltzmann, David Hilbert, and Ernst
Mach. From this, Rota concluded that Gibbs's work was better known among the scientific elite of his day than
the published material suggests.
[72]
Lynde Wheeler reproduces that mailing list in an appendix to his biography
of Gibbs.
[73]
That Gibbs succeeded in interesting his European correspondents in his work is demonstrated by
the fact that his monograph "On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances" was translated into German
(then the leading language for chemistry) by Wilhelm Ostwald in 1892 and into French by Henri Louis Le
Chtelier in 1899.
[74]
Gibbs's most immediate and obvious influence was on physical chemistry and statistical mechanics, two
disciplines which he greatly helped to found. During Gibbs's lifetime, his phase rule was experimentally
validated by Dutch chemist H. W. Bakhuis Roozeboom, who showed how to apply it in a variety of situations,
thereby assuring it of widespread use.
[75]
In industrial chemistry, Gibbs's thermodynamics found many
applications during the early 20th century, from electrochemistry to the development of the Haber process for
the synthesis of ammonia.
[76]
When Dutch physicist J. D. van der Waals received the 1910 Nobel Prize "for his work on the equation of state
for gases and liquids" he acknowledged the great influence of Gibbs's work on that subject.
[77]
Max Planck
received the 1918 Nobel Prize for his work on quantum mechanics, particularly his 1900 paper on Planck's law
for quantized black-body radiation. That work was based largely on the thermodynamics of Kirchhoff,
Boltzmann, and Gibbs. Planck declared that Gibbs's name "not only in America but in the whole world will ever
be reckoned among the most renowned theoretical physicists of all times."
[78]
The first half of the 20th century saw the publication of two influential textbooks that soon came to be regarded
as founding documents of chemical thermodynamics, both of which used and extended Gibbs's work in that
field: these were Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Processes (1923), by Gilbert N. Lewis and
Merle Randall, and Modern Thermodynamics by the Methods of Willard Gibbs (1933), by Edward A.
Guggenheim.
[79]
Under the influence of Lewis, William Giauque (who had originally wanted to be a chemical
engineer) went on to become a professor of chemistry at Berkeley and won the 1949 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
for his investigations into the properties of matter at temperatures close to absolute zero, studies guided by the
third law of thermodynamics.
[80]
Gibbs's work on statistical ensembles, as presented in his 1902 textbook, has had a great impact in both
theoretical physics and in pure mathematics.
[40][62]
According to mathematical physicist Arthur Wightman,
It is one of the striking features of the work of Gibbs, noticed by every student of thermodynamics
and statistical mechanics, that his formulations of physical concepts were so felicitously chosen that
they have survived 100 years of turbulent development in theoretical physics and mathematics.
A. S. Wightman, 1990
[40]
11 of 22 5/29/2014 11:34 PM
Title page of Gibbs's Elementary
Principles in Statistical Mechanics, one of
the founding documents of that discipline,
published in 1902
Initially unaware of Gibbs's contributions in that field, Albert
Einstein wrote three papers on statistical mechanics, published
between 1902 and 1904. After reading Gibbs's textbook (which was
translated into German by Ernst Zermelo in 1905), Einstein
declared that Gibbs's treatment was superior to his own and
explained that he would not have written those papers if he had
known Gibbs's work.
[81]
Gibbs's early papers on the use of graphical methods in
thermodynamics reflect a powerfully original understanding of what
mathematicians would later call "convex analysis",
[82]
including
ideas that, according to Barry Simon, "lay dormant for about
seventy-five years".
[83]
Important mathematical concepts based on
Gibbs's work on thermodynamics and statistical mechanics include
the Gibbs lemma in game theory, the Gibbs inequality and Gibbs
algorithm in information theory, as well as Gibbs sampling in
computational statistics.
The development of vector calculus was Gibbs's other great
contribution to mathematics. The publication in 1901 of E. B.
Wilson's textbook Vector Analysis, based on Gibbs's lectures at
Yale, did much to propagate the use of vectorial methods and
notation in both mathematics and theoretical physics, definitively
displacing the quaternions that had until then been dominant in the
scientific literature.
[84]
At Yale, Gibbs was also mentor to Lee De Forest, who went on to invent the triode amplifier and has been
called the "father of radio".
[85]
De Forest credited Gibbs's influence for the realization "that the leaders in
electrical development would be those who pursued the higher theory of waves and oscillations and the
transmission by these means of intelligence and power."
[46]
Another student of Gibbs who played a significant
role in the development of radio technology was Lynde Wheeler.
[86]
Gibbs also had an indirect influence on mathematical economics. He supervised the thesis of Irving Fisher, who
received the first Ph.D. in economics from Yale in 1891. In that work, published in 1892 as Mathematical
Investigations in the Theory of Value and Prices, Fisher drew a direct analogy between Gibbsian equilibrium in
physical and chemical systems, and the general equilibrium of markets, and he used Gibbs's vectorial notation.
[44][87]
Gibbs's proteg Edwin Bidwell Wilson became, in turn, a mentor to leading American economist and
Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson.
[88]
In 1947, Samuelson published Foundations of Economic Analysis, based
on his doctoral dissertation, in which he used as epigraph a remark attributed to Gibbs: "Mathematics is a
language." Samuelson later explained that in his understanding of prices his "debts were not primarily to Pareto
or Slutsky, but to the great thermodynamicist, Willard Gibbs of Yale."
[89]
Mathematician Norbert Wiener cited Gibbs's use of probability in the formulation of statistical mechanics as
"the first great revolution of twentieth century physics" and as a major influence on his conception of
cybernetics. Wiener explained in the preface to his book The Human Use of Human Beings that it was "devoted
to the impact of the Gibbsian point of view on modern life, both through the substantive changes it has made to
working science, and through the changes it has made indirectly in our attitude to life in general."
[90]
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Bronze memorial tablet, originally
installed in 1912 at the Sloane Physics
Laboratory, now at the entrance to the
Josiah Willard Gibbs Laboratories,
Yale University.
Building housing the Josiah Willard
Gibbs Laboratories, at Yale
University's Science Hill
When the German physical chemist Walther Nernst visited Yale in 1906
to give the Silliman lecture, he was surprised to find no tangible
memorial for Gibbs. He therefore donated his $500 lecture fee to the
university to help pay for a suitable monument. This was finally
unveiled in 1912, in the form of a bronze bas-relief by sculptor Lee
Lawrie, installed in the Sloane Physics Laboratory.
[91]
In 1910, the
American Chemical Society established the Willard Gibbs Award for
eminent work in pure or applied chemistry.
[92]
In 1923, the American
Mathematical Society endowed the Josiah Willard Gibbs Lectureship,
"to show the public some idea of the aspects of mathematics and its
applications".
[93]
In 1945, Yale University created
the J. Willard Gibbs
Professorship in Theoretical
Chemistry, held until 1973 by
Lars Onsager. Onsager, who
much like Gibbs focused on
applying new mathematical ideas
to problems in physical
chemistry, won the 1968 Nobel
Prize in chemistry.
[94]
In addition
to establishing the Josiah Willard Gibbs Laboratories and the J. Willard
Gibbs Assistant Professorship in Mathematics, Yale has hosted two
symposia dedicated to Gibbs's life and work, one in 1989 and another on
the centenary of his death, in 2003.
[95]
Rutgers University endowed a J.
Willard Gibbs Professorship of Thermomechanics, held as of 2014 by Bernard Coleman.
[96]
Gibbs was elected in 1950 to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans.
[97]
The oceanographic research ship USNS
Josiah Willard Gibbs (T-AGOR-1) was in service with the United States Navy from 1958 to 1971.
[98]
The
Gibbs crater, near the eastern limb of the Moon, was named in the scientist's honor in 1964.
[99]
Edward Guggenheim introduced the symbol G for the Gibbs free energy in 1933, and this was used also by Dirk
ter Haar in 1966.
[100]
This notation is now universal and is recommended by the IUPAC.
[101]
In 1960, William
Giauque and others suggested the name "gibbs" (abbreviated gbs.) for the unit of entropy, calorie / Kelvin,
[102]
but this usage did not become common and the corresponding SI unit, Joule / Kelvin, carries no special name.
In literature
In 1909, the American historian and novelist Henry Adams finished an essay entitled "The Rule of Phase
Applied to History", in which he sought to apply Gibbs's phase rule and other thermodynamic concepts to a
general theory of human history. William James, Henry Bumstead, and others criticized both Adams's tenuous
grasp of the scientific concepts that he invoked, as well as the arbitrariness of his application of those concepts
as metaphors for the evolution of human thought and society.
[103]
The essay remained unpublished until it
13 of 22 5/29/2014 11:34 PM
Cover of the June 1946 issue of
Fortune, by artist Arthur Lidov,
showing Gibbs's thermodynamic
surface of water and his formula
for the phase rule
appeared posthumously in 1919, in The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, edited by Henry Adams's
younger brother Brooks.
[104]
In the 1930s, feminist poet Muriel Rukeyser became fascinated by Willard
Gibbs and wrote a long poem about his life and work ("Gibbs", included in
the collection A Turning Wind, published in 1939), as well as a book-length
biography (Willard Gibbs, 1942).
[105]
According to Rukeyser:
Willard Gibbs is the type of the imagination at work in the world. His
story is that of an opening up which has had its effect on our lives and
our thinking; and, it seems to me, it is the emblem of the naked
imaginationwhich is called abstract and impractical, but whose
discoveries can be used by anyone who is interested, in whatever
"field"an imagination which for me, more than that of any other
figure in American thought, any poet, or political, or religious figure,
stands for imagination at its essential points.
Muriel Rukeyser, 1949
[106]
In 1946, Fortune magazine illustrated a cover story on "Fundamental
Science" with a representation of the thermodynamic surface that Maxwell
had built based on Gibbs's proposal. Rukeyser had called this surface a
"statue of water"
[107]
and the magazine saw in it "the abstract creation of a
great American scientist that lends itself to the symbolism of contemporary art forms."
[108]
The artwork by
Arthur Lidov also included Gibbs's mathematical expression of the phase rule for heterogeneous mixtures, as
well as a radar screen, an oscilloscope waveform, Newton's apple, and a small rendition of a three-dimensional
phase diagram.
[108]
Gibbs's nephew, Ralph Gibbs Van Name, a professor of physical chemistry at Yale, was unhappy with
Rukeyser's biography, in part because of her lack of scientific training. Van Name had withheld the family
papers from her and, after her book was published in 1942 to positive literary but mixed scientific reviews, he
tried to encourage Gibbs's former students to produce a more technically oriented biography.
[109]
Rukeyser's
approach to Gibbs was also sharply criticized by Gibbs's former student and protg Edwin Wilson.
[110]
With
Van Name's and Wilson's encouragement, physicist Lynde Wheeler published a new biography of Gibbs in
1951.
[111][112]
Both Gibbs and Rukeyser's biography of him figure prominently in the poetry collection True North (1997) by
Stephanie Strickland.
[113]
In fiction, Gibbs appears as the mentor to character Kit Traverse in Thomas
Pynchon's novel Against the Day (2006). That novel also prominently discusses the birefringence of Iceland
spar, an optical phenomenon that Gibbs investigated.
[114]
Gibbs stamp (2005)
In 2005, the United States Postal Service issued the American Scientists commemorative postage stamp series
designed by artist Victor Stabin, depicting Gibbs, John von Neumann, Barbara McClintock, and Richard
Feynman. The first day of issue ceremony for the series was held on May 4 at Yale University's Luce Hall and
was attended by John Marburger, scientific advisor to the President of the United States, Rick Levin, president
of Yale, and family members of the scientists honored, including physician John W. Gibbs, a distant cousin of
14 of 22 5/29/2014 11:34 PM
Willard Gibbs.
[115]
Kenneth R. Jolls, a professor of chemical engineering at Iowa State University and an expert on graphical
methods in thermodynamics, consulted on the design of the stamp honoring Gibbs.
[116][117][118]
The stamp
identifies Gibbs as a "thermodynamicist" and features a diagram from the 4th edition of Maxwell's Theory of
Heat, published in 1875, which illustrates Gibbs's thermodynamic surface for water.
[117][118]
Microprinting on
the collar of Gibbs's portrait depicts his original mathematical equation for the change in the energy of a
substance in terms of its entropy and the other state variables.
[119]
Physical chemistry: free energy, phase diagram, phase rule, transport phenomena
Statistical mechanics: statistical ensemble, phase space, chemical potential, Gibbs entropy, Gibbs
paradox
Mathematics: Vector Analysis, convex analysis, Gibbs phenomenon
Electromagnetism: Maxwell's equations, birefringence
Timeline of thermodynamics
List of notable textbooks in statistical mechanics
Timeline of United States discoveries
List of theoretical physicists
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^ Wilson, Edwin B. (1944). "Willard Gibbs". Science 99 (2576): 386389. doi:10.1126/science.99.2576.386
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1126%2Fscience.99.2576.386). JSTOR 1669456 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/1669456).
110.
^ Wheeler 1998, pp. ixxiii 111.
^ Wilson, Edwin B. (1951). "Josiah Willard Gibbs". American Scientist 39 (2): 287289. JSTOR 27826371
(https://www.jstor.org/stable/27826371).
112.
^ Strickland, Stephanie (1997). True North. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
ISBN 978-0-268-01899-3.
113.
^ Pynchon, Thomas (2006). Against the Day. New York: Penguin. ISBN 978-1-59420-120-2. 114.
^ "Yale scientist featured in new stamp series" (http://www.yale.edu/opa/arc-ybc/v33.n29/story3.html). Yale Bulletin
& Calendar 33 (28). 20 May 2005. Retrieved 30 Nov 2012.
115.
^ "Iowa State Chemical Engineer Drives Issue of New Stamp Honoring Father of Thermodynamics"
(http://www.eng.iastate.edu/coe/feature/jolls.asp). College Feature, Iowa State University, College of Engineering.
2004. Retrieved 17 Nov 2012.
116.
^
a

b
Hacker, Annette (11 Nov 2004). "ISU professor helps develop postage stamp honoring noted scientist"
(http://www.public.iastate.edu/~nscentral/news/04/nov/stamp.shtml). News Service, Iowa State University. Retrieved
17 Nov 2012.
117.
^
a

b
"Postal Service Pays Homage to Josiah Willard Gibbs". Chemical Engineering Progress 101 (7): 57. 2005. 118.
^ Spakovszky, Zoltan (2005). "Stamp of Authenticity" (http://web.mit.edu/16.unified/www/FALL/thermodynamics
/figures/MechEng-4-2006-Gibbs.pdf). ASME Mechanical Engineering 128 (4): 7.
119.
Primary
L. P. Wheeler, E. O. Waters and S. W. Dudley (eds.),The Early Work of Willard Gibbs in Applied
Mechanics, (New York: Henry Schuman, 1947). ISBN 1-881987-17-5. This contains previously
unpublished work by Gibbs, from the period between 1863 and 1871.
J. W. Gibbs, "On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances", Transactions of the Connecticut
Academy of Arts and Sciences, 3, 108248, 343524, (18741878). Reproduced in both The Scientific
Papers (1906), pp. 55353 (https://archive.org/stream/scientificpapers01gibbuoft#page/54/mode/2up) and
The Collected Works of J. Willard Gibbs (1928), pp. 55353.
E. B. Wilson, Vector Analysis, a text-book for the use of students of Mathematics and Physics, founded
upon the Lectures of J. Willard Gibbs, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929 [1901]).
J. W. Gibbs, Elementary Principles in Statistical Mechanics, developed with especial reference to the
rational foundation of thermodynamics, (New York: Dover Publications, 1960 [1902]).
Gibbs's other papers are included in both:
The Scientific Papers of J. Willard Gibbs, in two volumes, eds. H. A. Bumstead and R. G. Van Name,
(Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press, 1993 [1906]). ISBN 0-918024-77-3, ISBN 1-881987-06-X. For scans
20 of 22 5/29/2014 11:34 PM
of the 1906 printing, see vol. I (https://archive.org/stream/scientificpapers01gibbuoft#page/n5/mode/2up)
and vol. II (https://archive.org/stream/scientificpapers02gibbuoft#page/n3/mode/2up).
The Collected Works of J. Willard Gibbs, in two volumes, eds. W. R. Longley and R. G. Van Name, (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1957 [1928]). For scans of the 1928 printing, see vol. I (http://gallica.bnf.fr
/ark:/12148/bpt6k95192s) and vol. II (https://archive.org/details/collectedworksj00longgoog).
Secondary
H. A. Bumstead, "Josiah Willard Gibbs", American Journal of Science (ser. 4) 16, 187202 (1903)
doi:10.2475/ajs.s4-16.93.187 (http://dx.doi.org/10.2475%2Fajs.s4-16.93.187). Reprinted with some
additions in both The Scientific Papers, vol. I, pp. xiiixxviiii (https://archive.org/stream
/scientificpapers01gibbuoft#page/n15/mode/2up) (1906) and The Collected Works of J. Willard Gibbs,
vol. I, pp. xiiixxviiii (1928). Also available here (http://www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/helios/fachinfo
/www/math/htmg/gibbs-bumstead.htm).
D. G. Caldi and G. D. Mostow (eds.), Proceedings of the Gibbs Symposium, Yale University, May 1517,
1989, (American Mathematical Society and American Institute of Physics, 1990).
W. H. Cropper, "The Greatest Simplicity: Willard Gibbs", in Great Physicists, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001), pp. 106123. ISBN 0-19-517324-4
M. J. Crowe, A History of Vector Analysis: The Evolution of the Idea of a Vectorial System, (New York:
Dover, 1994 [1967]). ISBN 0-486-67910-1
J. G. Crowther, Famous American Men of Science, (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969
[1937]). ISBN 0-8369-0040-5
F. G. Donnan and A. E. Hass (eds.), A Commentary on the Scientific Writings of J. Willard Gibbs, in two
volumes, (New York: Arno, 1980 [1936]). ISBN 0-405-12544-5. Only vol I. (https://archive.org/details
/commentaryonscie01donn) is currently available online.
P. Duhem, Josiah-Willard Gibbs propos de la publication de ses Mmoires scientifiques
(https://archive.org/details/josiahwillardgib00duheuoft), (Paris: A. Herman, 1908).
C. S. Hastings, "Josiah Willard Gibbs" (https://archive.org/stream/biographicalmemo011929mbp#page
/n417/mode/2up), Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, 6, 373393 (1909).
M. J. Klein, "Gibbs, Josiah Willard", in Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 5, (Detroit:
Charles Scriber's Sons, 2008), pp. 386393.
M. Rukeyser, Willard Gibbs: American Genius, (Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press, 1988 [1942]). ISBN
0-918024-57-9
R. J. Seeger, J. Willard Gibbs, American mathematical physicist par excellence, (Oxford and New York:
Pergamon Press, 1974). ISBN 0-08-018013-2
L. P. Wheeler, Josiah Willard Gibbs, The History of a Great Mind, (Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press,
1998 [1951]). ISBN 1-881987-11-6
A. S. Wightman, "Convexity and the notion of equilibrium state in thermodynamics and statistical
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mechanics". Published as an introduction to R. B. Israel, Convexity in the Theory of Lattice Gases,
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. ixlxxxv. ISBN 0-691-08209-X
E. B. Wilson, "Reminiscences of Gibbs by a student and colleague" (http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.bams
/1183494779), Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 37, 401416 (1931).
O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Josiah Willard Gibbs" (http://www-history.mcs.st-
andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Gibbs.html), MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St
Andrews.
"Josiah Willard Gibbs (http://www.aip.org/history/gap/Gibbs/Gibbs.html)", in Selected Papers of Great
American Scientists, American Institute of Physics, (2003 [1976])
Josiah Willard Gibbs (http://www.genealogy.ams.org/id.php?id=132578) at the Mathematics Genealogy
Project
"Gibbs" (http://murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org/writing/gibbs/) by Muriel Rukeyser
Reflections on Gibbs: From Statistical Physics to the Amistad (http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.2460) by Leo
Kadanoff, Prof.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Josiah_Willard_Gibbs&oldid=607020578"
Categories: 1839 births 1903 deaths Thermodynamicists Mathematical analysts
American physical chemists American mathematicians 19th-century American mathematicians
Foreign Members of the Royal Society Yale University alumni University of Heidelberg alumni
Yale University faculty Hopkins School alumni People from New Haven, Connecticut
Recipients of the Copley Medal Burials at Grove Street Cemetery Theoretical physicists
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