Josiah Willard Gibbs
Josiah Willard Gibbs (; February 11, 1839 – April 28, 1903) was an American scientist who made significant 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 proper…
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Jump to content Main menu Main menu move to sidebar hide Navigation Main page Contents Current events Random article About Wikipedia Contact us Contribute Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file Special pages Search Search Appearance Donate Create account Log in Personal tools Donate Create account Log in Contents move to sidebar hide (Top) 1 Biography Toggle Biography subsection 1.1 Family background 1.2 Education 1.3 Career, 1863–73 1.4 Career, 1873–80 1.5 Career, 1880–1903 1.6 Personal life and character 2 Major scientific contributions Toggle Major scientific contributions subsection 2.1 Chemical and electrochemical thermodynamics 2.2 Statistical mechanics 2.3 Vector analysis 2.4 Physical optics 3 Scientific recognition 4 Influence 5 Commemoration Toggle Commemoration subsection 5.1 In literature 5.2 Gibbs stamp (2005) 6 Outline of principal work 7 See also 8 References Toggle References subsection 8.1 Bibliography 8.2 Primary 8.3 Secondary 9 External links Toggle the table of contents Josiah Willard Gibbs 65 languages Afrikaans Aragonés العربية مصرى Asturianu Azərbaycanca Беларуская Български বাংলা Bosanski Català Čeština Dansk Deutsch Ελληνικά Esperanto Español Euskara فارسی Suomi Français Gaeilge Galego עברית Hrvatski Kreyòl ayisyen Magyar Հայերեն Bahasa Indonesia Italiano 日本語 Қазақша ಕನ್ನಡ 한국어 Lietuvių Latviešu Malagasy Македонски मराठी Nederlands Norsk nynorsk Norsk bokmål Occitan Polski Piemontèis پښتو Português Română Русский Slovenčina Slovenščina Српски / srpski Svenska தமிழ் Тоҷикӣ Türkçe ئۇيغۇرچە / Uyghurche Українська Oʻzbekcha / ўзбекча Tiếng Việt Winaray მარგალური 閩南語 / Bân-lâm-gí 粵語 中文 Edit links Article Talk English Read Edit View history Tools Tools move to sidebar hide Actions Read Edit View history General What links here Related changes Upload file Permanent link Page information Cite this page Get shortened URL Print/export Download as PDF Printable version In other projects Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikisource Wikidata item Appearance move to sidebar hide From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Jevansen ( talk | contribs ) at 05:27, 4 April 2024 (Moving from Category:Theoretical physicists to Category:American theoretical physicists using Cat-a-lot ) . The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision . Revision as of 05:27, 4 April 2024 by Jevansen ( talk | contribs ) (Moving from Category:Theoretical physicists to Category:American theoretical physicists using Cat-a-lot ) ( diff ) ← Previous revision | Latest revision ( diff ) | Newer revision → ( diff ) American scientist (1839–1903) For the American linguist and theologian, see Josiah Willard Gibbs, Sr. For the United States Navy ship, see USNS Josiah Willard Gibbs (T-AGOR-1) . Josiah Willard Gibbs Born ( 1839-02-11 ) February 11, 1839 New Haven, Connecticut , U.S. Died April 28, 1903 (1903-04-28) (aged 64) New Haven, Connecticut, U.S. Alma mater Yale College ( BA , PhD ) Known for List Statistical mechanics Chemical thermodynamics Chemical potential Cross product Dyadics Exergy Principle of maximum work Phase rule Phase space Physical optics Physics of phase separation Statistical ensemble Surface stress Vector calculus Gibbs entropy Gibbs algorithm Gibbs distribution Gibbs’ elasticity Gibbs function Gibbs free energy Gibbs’ inequality Gibbs isotherm Gibbs’ H theorem Gibbs lemma Gibbs measure Gibbs paradox Gibbs phenomenon Gibbs state Gibbs’ thermodynamic surface Gibbs vector Gibbs–Appell equation of motion Gibbs–Donnan effect Gibbs–Duhem equation Gibbs–Helmholtz equation Gibbs–Marangoni effect Gibbs–Thomson equation Gibbs–Thomson effect Gibbs–Wulff theorem Awards Rumford Prize (1880) ForMemRS (1897) 1 Copley Medal (1901) Scientific career Fields Chemistry Mathematics Physics Institutions Yale College Thesis On the form of the teeth of wheels in spur gearing (1863) Doctoral advisor Hubert Anson Newton Doctoral students Edwin Bidwell Wilson Irving Fisher Henry Andrews Bumstead Lynde Wheeler Lee De Forest Signature Josiah Willard Gibbs ( / ɡ ɪ b z / ; 2 February 11, 1839 – April 28, 1903) was an American scientist who made significant 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 ensembles of the possible states of a physical system composed of many particles. Gibbs also worked on the application of Maxwell’s equations to problems in physical optics . As a mathematician, he created modern vector calculus (independently of the British scientist Oliver Heaviside , who carried out similar work during the same period) and described the Gibbs phenomenon in the theory of Fourier analysis. In 1863, Yale University 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 a professor of mathematical physics from 1871 until his death in 1903. 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.” 3 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, 3 “for his contributions to mathematical physics.” 4 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 thermodynamics what Laplace did for celestial mechanics and Maxwell did for electrodynamics, namely, made his field a well-nigh finished theoretical structure.” 5 Biography Family background Willard Gibbs as a young man Gibbs was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He 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 Sr. , and his wife Mary Anna, née 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. 6 His paternal grandmother, Mercy (Prescott) Gibbs, was the sister of Rebecca Minot Prescott Sherman, the wife of American founding father Roger Sherman ; and he was the second cousin of Roger Sherman Baldwin , see the Amistad case below. The elder Gibbs was generally known to his family and colleagues as “Josiah”, while the son was called “Willard”. 7 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 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. 8 Education Willard Gibbs was educated at the Hopkins School and entered Yale College in 1854 at the age of 15. At Yale, Gibbs received prizes for excellence in mathematics and Latin , and he graduated in 1858, near the top of his class. 9 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. 10 Relatively few documents from the period survive and it is difficult to reconstruct the details of Gibbs’s early career with precision. 11 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. 10 11 After the death of his father in 1861, Gibbs inherited enough money to make him financially independent. 12 Recurrent pulmonary trouble ailed the young Gibbs and his physicians were concerned that he might be susceptible to tuberculosis , which had killed his mother. 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. 13 14 Though in later years he used glasses only for reading or other close work, 13 Gibbs’s delicate health and imperfect eyesight probably explain why he did not volunteer to fight in the Civil War of 1861–65. 15 He was not conscripted and he remained at Yale for the duration of the war. 16 Gibbs during his time as a tutor at Yale 17 In 1863, Gibbs received the first Doctorate of Philosophy (PhD) 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 . 9 18 19 In 1861, Yale had become the first US university to offer a PhD degree 20 and Gibbs’s was only the fifth PhD granted in the US in any subject. 18 Career, 1863–73 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 year, he taught “natural philosophy” (i.e., physics). 6 In 1866, he patented a design for a railway brake 21 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. 22 After his term as tutor ended, Gibbs traveled to Europe with his sisters. They spent the winter of 1866–67 in Paris, where Gibbs attended lectures at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France , given by such distinguished mathematical scientists as Joseph Liouville and Michel Chasles . 23 Having undertaken a punishing regimen 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. 24 Moving to Berlin , Gibbs attended the lectures taught by mathematicians Karl Weierstrass and Leopold Kronecker , as well as by chemist Heinrich Gustav Magnus . 25 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. 26 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 . 27 Gibbs returned to Yale in June 1869 and briefly taught French to engineering students. 28 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. 29 30 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. 31 Career, 1873–80 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 ) Gibbs published his first work in 1873. 9 His papers on the geometric representation of thermodynamic quantities appeared in the Transactions of the Connecticut Academy . These papers introduced the use of different type phase diagrams, which were his favorite aids to the imagination process when doing research, rather than the mechanical models, such as the ones that Maxwell used in constructing his electromagnetic theory, which might not completely represent their corresponding phenomena. 32 Although the journal had few readers capable of understanding Gibbs’s work, 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 two plaster casts of his model and mailed one to Gibbs. That cast is on display at the Yale physics department. 33 34 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 Encyclopædia Britannica . 35 36 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.” 37 Gibbs then extended his thermodynamic analysis to multi-phase chemical systems (i.e., to systems composed of more than one form 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, 38 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.” 39 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. 40 The work has been described as “the Principia of thermodynamics” and as a work of “practically unlimited scope”. 38 It solidly laid the foundation for physical Chemistry. 41 Wilhelm Ostwald , who translated Gibbs’s monograph into German, referred to Gibbs as the “founder of chemical energetics”. 42 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 9 Gibbs continued to work without pay until 1880, when the new Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland offered him a position paying