J.

Willard Gibbs

Lived 1839 1903.

Willard Gibbs was a mathematical physicist who made enormous contributions to science: he
founded modern statistical mechanics, he founded chemical thermodynamics, and he invented
vector analysis.

Early Life and Education

Josiah Willard Gibbs was born on February 11, 1839 in New Haven, Connecticut, USA, the
hometown of Yale University.
Willard Gibbs family was prosperous and intellectual. His mothers name was Mary Anna Van Cleve.
She came from an eminent family and was an amateur ornithologist. His fathers name was also
Josiah Willard Gibbs. To avoid confusion, Gibbs Jr. was always known as Willard. His father, an
expert on languages and linguistics, was a professor of sacred literature at Yale Universitys School
of Divinity.
Willard Gibbs was privately educated at Hopkins Grammar School until he enrolled at Yale
University, aged just 15. He was awarded his degree four years later, in 1858, along with university
prizes in mathematics and Latin.

Willard Gibbs, a student at Yale University.

He immediately began working for an engineering Ph.D. at Yale, which he was awarded in 1863, at
the age of 24. This was the first ever award of an engineering Ph.D. to any student at an American
university.
His highly mathematical thesis had the title: On the Forms of the Teeth of Wheels in Spur Gearing.
Socially, Gibbs was quiet and bookish, a somewhat reserved student. Academically, he was brilliant.
While Gibbs was a student, three significant events took place:

In 1855, his mother died.

In 1861, his father died, leaving Gibbs and his two sisters a substantial inheritance, making
them financially independent.

From 186165 the American Civil War raged. Gibbs was not conscripted: his health was
fragile, and he suffered from respiratory problems. Also, his eyesight for reading was blurred,
caused by astigmatism. He eventually had to grind lenses himself to solve this problem.

Gibbs Academic Career

Tutoring at Yale
Yale University appointed Gibbs as a tutor in 1863. Tutors were expected to make themselves
available to teach any of Yales courses. Gibbs taught Latin for two years, followed by a year
teaching physics, while he continued privately to widen and sharpen his knowledge of engineering
and the physical sciences. During this time he patented an improved railway car brake.
Three Years in France and Germany
In 1866 Gibbs and his sisters, Anna and Julia, set off on a three-year trip to Europe.

Willard Gibbs attended lectures in Heidelberg given by Robert Bunsen, the great chemist. He also attended
lectures given by the great physicists Gustav Kirchhoff, and Hermann von Helmholtz.

Gibbs spent an academic year at each of the Sorbonne in Paris, and the Universities of Berlin and
Heidelberg in Germany. His single-minded purpose was to continue expanding and refining his
scientific knowledge.
Like his father, he seems to have had a considerable gift for languages, so working in French and
German caused him no problems.
France, Germany and the United Kingdom lay at the heart of the scientific world. Gibbs took a
unique approach by spending three years studying in the non-English speaking countries, which
gave him a distinctive scientific viewpoint compared with other American scientists of the time.
During the trip to Europe, Gibbs health was again a concern tuberculosis was suspected and he
and his sisters moved to the French Riviera, hoping the warm, dry Mediterranean climate would help
him. Thankfully, after a few months on the Riviera, he was pronounced free of tuberculosis.
Professorship at Yale
On his return to New Haven, Gibbs taught French for a time at Yale, and worked privately on some
of his engineering ideas.
In 1871 he was appointed Yales first professor of mathematical physics. The role was unpaid. Gibbs
was happy with this situation he was a man of modest needs, and his inheritance provided him
with more than enough money. Furthermore, Gibbs was happy that the role required little teaching
work, allowing him more thinking and research time.
As his scientific reputation grew, other universities head-hunted him. Gibbs chose to stay at Yale,
because he was happy in the familiar surroundings of his hometown and, also, Yales other scientists
told him how much they valued his presence at the university. He stayed at Yale for the whole of his
career and the University started paying him a salary to counterbalance offers he received from
other institutions.

Gibbs Most Significant Contributions to

Science
Gibbs was a man of immense intellect; his works reception brings to mind Isaac
Newtons experience when he first published his laws of motion and gravitation. One of his students
is said to have joked about Newton:
There goes a man who has written a book that neither he nor anybody else understands.
It was left to others to explain and spread Newtons complex ideas and mathematics.
Similarly, when Gibbs published his research, it was often little understood. One of the few people
who did understand and appreciate its significance wasJames Clerk Maxwell.
Indeed when Maxwell died at a young age, the word in Yale with echoes of the old joke about
Newton was:
Only one man lived who could understand Gibbs papers. That was Maxwell, and now he is dead.

Onegoodusetowhichanybodymightputasuperiortrainingin
puremathematicsistostudytheproblemssetusbyNature.
WILLARDGIBBS
Mathematical Physicist

Thermodynamics
Thermodynamics explores the relationship between temperature, entropy, and energy. Its laws
underpin the physical characteristics of everything in the universe, including life. Its ideas are rather
complex; easier aspects of thermodynamics are not usually introduced until university level in
chemistry and physics or perhaps the end of high school chemistry.
In 1873, two years into his professorship, the 34-year-old Gibbs began publishing work that
revolutionized our understanding of thermodynamics. He began by noting that the first two laws of

thermodynamics could be combined into a single equation of state the Gibbs Equation of State
now a basic equation of thermodynamics:

dU = TdS PdV
In two groundbreaking papers he showed how expressing thermodynamic quantities on graphs he
had constructed led to entirely new conclusions about the behavior of matter. These graphs were in
three dimensions, with x, y and z axes.
Gibbs sent copies of his work to 75 notable scientists in Europe. One of these was James Clerk
Maxwell at the University of Cambridge.

Willard Gibbs and James Clerk Maxwell

Maxwell, one of the worlds foremost authorities on thermodynamics, devoured Gibbs work, realizing
that it solved a conceptual problem he had been wrestling with in vain for over two years.
Furthermore, Gibbs new interpretation of thermodynamics improved Maxwells personal
understanding of the field.

A copy of the original plaster model sent by Maxwell to Gibbs, held by Yales Peabody Museum of Natural
History. The model represents the behavior of a water-like substance plotted on axes of volume (x-axis),
entropy (y-axis) and energy (z-axis). The dark lines on the model are lines of equal pressure and equal
temperature.

Maxwell shared Gibbs work enthusiastically with other British scientists.

He made three 3-dimensional plaster models of a surface in one of Gibbs graphs and sent one
model to Gibbs as a token of his appreciation and respect.

Maxwell and Gibbs were on the same mental wavelength they understood each others work,
which few other people did at the time.
Unfortunately, Maxwells untimely death in 1879 deprived the scientific world of what could have
become a very fruitful, if long-distance, partnership between two great intellects.

Reshaping the Science of Thermodynamics

In 1878 Gibbs published a third thermodynamics paper, the most revolutionary of them all. On the
Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances Part II.
In this paper Gibbs founded the science of chemical thermodynamics, entirely shaping our modern
understanding of the field. This work lies at the heart of physical chemistry, telling us which chemical
reactions are feasible.
Unfortunately, Gibbs work was so highly mathematical that it took many years before its message
was fully understood.
If Gibbs had a fault, it was that he used mathematics to do nearly all of his talking for him. He felt
little need to relate his mathematics and ideas to real-world examples and he was not concerned if
people said his work was too hard to understand.
He took exactly the same lofty approach to his lectures as he did his writing. One of his best
students, Edwin Bidwell Wilson, recalled being told by Gibbs:

Inthethirtyyearsofmyprofessorshipofmathematicalphysics,
Ivehadbutahalfdozenstudentsadequatelypreparedtofollowmy
lectures.
WILLARDGIBBS
Mathematical Physicist

ReadingGibbsEquilibriumissomethinglikereadingLaplace,
whofrequentlyomitsbuttheconclusion,withtheoptimisticremarkitis
easytosee,shorthandforthingsseenfollowinghourssometimesdays
ofhardwork.
ERICTEMPLEBELL
Mathematician

The Phase Rule

Gibbs discovered that in any equilibrium mixture of C components in P phases the number of
variables F that can be independently controlled is:

F=CP+2
With this rule, which is a general, fundamental rule of thermodynamics, phase diagrams become an
indispensable part of the toolkit of physical chemistry.

Gibbs Thermodynamics on a Stamp

In 2005, a U.S. stamp commemorated Gibbs graphical thermodynamics methods bearing an image
of Gibbs and a two-dimensional contour map of one of his thermodynamic surfaces.

Willard Gibbs 2005 Stamp

Vector Analysis A New Branch of

Mathematics
James Clerk Maxwell used a form of mathematics called quaternion calculus in his electromagnetic
theory of light. Gibbs took up Maxwells new theory enthusiastically, but he thought the quaternion
calculus Maxwell had used seemed rather inconvenient. It had a vector part and a scalar part, but in
Gibbs opinion was geometrically unsatisfying.
In order to teach Maxwells theory to his own students, Gibbs developed a new branch of
mathematics called vector analysis/calculus. He did this in 1881 1884, producing lecture notes for
his new mathematical methods.
British physicist Oliver Heaviside independently invented vector calculus between 1880 and 1887.
Neither man was aware of the others work.
The vector calculus invented by Gibbs and Heaviside is now used extensively in both physics and
mathematics.
The notation used today for the scalar and vector products was also devised by Gibbs.

Amathematicianmaysayanythinghepleases,butaphysicist
mustbeatleastpartiallysane.

WILLARDGIBBS
Mathematical Physicist

Statistical Mechanics
Statistical mechanics allows physical phenomena to be explained and calculated by averaging the
individual behaviors of huge numbers of atoms/molecules.
In 1902, Gibbs published a new scientific masterpiece Elementary Principles in Statistical
Mechanics. He had worked day and night on the book in late 1900 and early 1901.
What we now know as statistical mechanics had been invented and developed by Daniel Bernoulli,
James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann.
Gibbs book came like a bolt from the blue. It needed to refer only a little to what had gone before;
and then revealed an entirely new formulation of the science.
Gibbs devised a new mathematical framework for statistical mechanics which bridged the gap
between classical and (as yet undiscovered) quantum physics, paving the way for the quantum
world that was to unfold in the following years.
Like his earlier works, most scientists found Gibbs statistical mechanics book difficult to understand.
However, perseverance eventually bore fruit and it is Gibbs formulation of statistical mechanics that
is still used today he even coined the term statistical mechanics.

WhenIenteredNielsBohrsinstituteinCopenhagenin1924,
thefirstthingBohrdemandedwasthatIshouldreadthebookofGibbson
thermodynamics.AndheaddedthatGibbshadbeentheonlyphysicistwho
reallyunderstoodstatisticalthermodynamics.
WERNERHEISENBERG
Theoretical Physicist, Nobel Prize in Physics 1932

Gibbsdidforstatisticalmechanicsandforthermodynamics
whatLaplacedidforcelestialmechanicsandMaxwelldidfor
electrodynamics,namely,madehisfieldawellnighfinishedtheoretical
structure.
ROBERTMILLIKAN
Physicist, Nobel Prize in Physics 1923

Honors
In 1880 Gibbs won the Rumford Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In 1901 he was awarded the British Royal Societys Copely Medal, which was then the greatest prize
in science, equal to a Nobel Prize today; and a rarer award, since only one Copely Medal was
awarded each year. The award citation stated that Gibbs was:
the first to apply the second law of thermodynamics to the exhaustive discussion of the relation
between chemical, electrical, and thermal energy and capacity for external work.

Some Personal Details and the End

Except for three years in Europe, Gibbs lived all his life in the large family home his father built in
New Haven, Connecticut.
This steady life suited him, because he was a man who enjoyed regularity and order. There is an
irony in this, given that Gibbs significantly advanced our understanding of entropy which is often
characterized as disorder.
He attended church regularly and left New Haven only during his summer vacations, which he liked
to spend in the mountains.
Gibbs was perceived by people who knew him as kind, sympathetic and happy. He never married.
He shared the family home with his sisters: Anna, who remained unmarried; and Julia, her husband
and children.

Josiah Willard Gibbs died at the age of 64 on April 28, 1903, just a year after he published his
seminal work on statistical thermodynamics. His death was caused by an intestinal obstruction.
He was buried in the Grove Street Cemetery, New Haven.

JosiahWillardGibbsnamewillbecountednotonlyin
Americabutthroughouttheworldasoneofthemostfamoustheoretical
physicistsofalltime.
MAXPLANCK
Theoretical Physicist, Nobel Prize in Physics 1918