64 Facts About Willard Gibbs

Josiah Willard Gibbs was an American scientist who made significant theoretical contributions to physics, chemistry, and mathematics.

Willard Gibbs worked on the application of Maxwell's equations to problems in physical optics.

Willard Gibbs belonged to an old Yankee family that had produced distinguished American clergymen and academics since the 17th century.

Willard Gibbs was the fourth of five children and the only son of Josiah Willard Gibbs Sr.

On his father's side, he was descended from Samuel Willard Gibbs, who served as acting President of Harvard College from 1701 to 1707.

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Elder Gibbs was generally known to his family and colleagues as "Josiah", while the son was called "Willard".

Josiah Willard Gibbs was a linguist and theologian who served as professor of sacred literature at Yale Divinity School from 1824 until his death in 1861.

Willard Gibbs 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.

Willard Gibbs was educated at the Hopkins School and entered Yale College in 1854 at the age of 15.

At Yale, Willard Gibbs received prizes for excellence in mathematics and Latin, and he graduated in 1858, near the top of his class.

Willard Gibbs remained at Yale as a graduate student at the Sheffield Scientific School.

At age 19, soon after his graduation from college, Willard Gibbs was inducted into the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, a scholarly institution composed primarily of members of the Yale faculty.

Willard Gibbs suffered from astigmatism, whose treatment was then still largely unfamiliar to oculists, so that Gibbs had to diagnose himself and grind his own lenses.

Willard Gibbs was not conscripted and he remained at Yale for the duration of the war.

In Heidelberg, Willard Gibbs was exposed to the work of physicists Gustav Kirchhoff and Hermann von Helmholtz, and chemist Robert Bunsen.

Willard Gibbs returned to Yale in June 1869 and briefly taught French to engineering students.

Willard Gibbs, who had independent means and had yet to publish anything, was assigned to teach graduate students exclusively and was hired without salary.

Willard Gibbs then produced two plaster casts of his model and mailed one to Gibbs.

Willard Gibbs 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.

Prospects of collaboration between him and Willard Gibbs were cut short by Maxwell's early death in 1879, aged 48.

From 1880 to 1884, Willard Gibbs worked on developing the exterior algebra of Hermann Grassmann into a vector calculus well-suited to the needs of physicists.

Willard 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.

From 1882 to 1889, Willard 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.

Willard Gibbs coined the term statistical mechanics and introduced key concepts in the corresponding mathematical description of physical systems, including the notions of chemical potential, and statistical ensemble .

Willard Gibbs's retiring personality and intense focus on his work limited his accessibility to students.

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Willard Gibbs 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 home—a little exercise between work and dinner—and one might occasionally come across him at that time.

Willard 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.

Willard Gibbs joined Yale's College Church at the end of his freshman year and remained a regular attendant for the rest of his life.

Willard Gibbs generally voted for the Republican candidate in presidential elections but, like other "Mugwumps", his concern over the growing corruption associated with machine politics led him to support Grover Cleveland, a conservative Democrat, in the election of 1884.

Willard Gibbs did not produce a substantial personal correspondence and many of his letters were later lost or destroyed.

Willard Gibbs was not a freak, he had no striking ways, he was a kindly dignified gentleman.

Willard Gibbs's manner was cordial without being effusive and conveyed clearly the innate simplicity and sincerity of his nature.

Willard Gibbs obtained what later came to be known as the "Willard Gibbs–Duhem equation".

Together with James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann, Willard 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 ensembles of all possible physical states of a system composed of many particles.

Willard Gibbs introduced the concept of "phase of a mechanical system".

Willard Gibbs used the concept to define the microcanonical, canonical, and grand canonical ensembles; all related to the Gibbs measure, thus obtaining a more general formulation of the statistical properties of many-particle systems than Maxwell and Boltzmann had achieved before him.

Willard 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".

Willard Gibbs then sought to publicize Grassmann's work, stressing that it was both more general and historically prior to Hamilton's quaternionic algebra.

Willard Gibbs applied his vector methods to the determination of planetary and comet orbits.

Willard Gibbs developed the concept of mutually reciprocal triads of vectors that later proved to be of importance in crystallography.

In that work, Willard 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 .

Willard Gibbs 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, 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.

Willard Gibbs worked at a time when there was little tradition of rigorous theoretical science in the United States.

Willard Gibbs's 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.

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.

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Willard 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.

Willard Gibbs 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.

Willard Gibbs 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.

Willard Gibbs was awarded honorary doctorates by Princeton University and Williams College.

In Europe, Willard Gibbs was inducted as honorary member of the London Mathematical Society in 1892 and elected Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1897.

Willard Gibbs was elected as corresponding member of the Prussian and French Academies of Science and received honorary doctorates from the universities of Dublin, Erlangen, and Christiania .

From this, Rota concluded that Willard Gibbs's work was better known among the scientific elite of his day than the published material suggests.

That Willard 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 by Wilhelm Ostwald in 1892 and into French by Henri Louis Le Chatelier in 1899.

In industrial chemistry, Willard 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.

At Yale, Willard Gibbs was mentor to Lee De Forest, who went on to invent the triode amplifier and has been called the "father of radio".

Willard Gibbs supervised the thesis of Irving Fisher, who received the first Ph.

Onsager, who much like Willard Gibbs, focused on applying new mathematical ideas to problems in physical chemistry, won the 1968 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Willard Gibbs was elected in 1950 to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans.

The oceanographic research ship USNS Josiah Willard Gibbs was in service with the United States Navy from 1958 to 1971.

Willard Gibbs is the type of the imagination at work in the world.

Willard Gibbs's 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 imagination—which 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.

Rukeyser's approach to Willard Gibbs was sharply criticized by Willard Gibbs's former student and protege Edwin Wilson.

In fiction, Willard Gibbs appears as the mentor to character Kit Traverse in Thomas Pynchon's novel Against the Day .

Microprinting on the collar of Willard 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.