Biography
Gibbs was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He belonged to an old Yankee line 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 assumption name, which he dual-lane 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. 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 thecousin of Roger Sherman Baldwin, see the Amistad effect below.
The elder Gibbs was generally so-called to his nature and colleagues as "Josiah", while the son was called "Willard". 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 lesson 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, Gibbs received prizes for excellence in mathematics and Latin, and he graduated in 1858, near the top of his class. 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 house composed primarily of members of the Yale faculty.
Relatively few documents from the period represent and it is unmanageable to restyle the details of Gibbs's early career with precision. In the concepts 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 command on meteors, who remained Gibbs's lifelong friend and confidant. After the death of his father in 1861, Gibbs inherited enough money to make him financially independent.
Recurrent conscripted and he remained at Yale for the duration of the war.
In 1863, Gibbs received the first Doctorate of Philosophy Ph.D. 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 appearance for gears. In 1861, Yale had become the first US university to offer a Ph.D. measure and Gibbs's was only the fifth Ph.D. granted in the US in any subject.
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. In 1866, he patented a ordering for a railway brake 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.
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, condition by such(a) distinguished mathematical scientists as Joseph Liouville and Michel Chasles. 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.
Moving to Berlin, Gibbs attended the lectures taught by mathematicians Karl Weierstrass and Leopold Kronecker, as alive as by chemist Heinrich Gustav Magnus. 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 remanded to New Haven, leaving Gibbs and his sister Anna in Germany. 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 main authorities in the natural sciences, particularly chemistry and thermodynamics.
Gibbs described to Yale in June 1869 and briefly taught French to engineering students. 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. In 1871, he was appointed Professor of Mathematical Physics at Yale, the first such(a) 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.
Gibbs published his first work in 1873. His papers on the geometric representation of thermodynamic quantities appeared in the Transactions of the Connecticut Academy. These papers introduced the ownership 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 clay framework 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.
Maxwell subject 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. 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."
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 approximately three hundred pages and contains precisely seven hundred numbered mathematical equations, begins with a consultation from Rudolf Clausius that expresses what would later be called the first andlaws of thermodynamics: "The energy of the world is constant. The entropy of the world tends towards a maximum."
Gibbs's monograph rigorously and ingeniously applied his thermodynamic techniques to the interpretation of physico-chemical phenomena, explaining and relating what had before been a mass of isolated facts and observations. The work has been described as "the Principia of thermodynamics" and as a work of "practically unlimited scope". It solidly laid the foundation for physical Chemistry. Wilhelm Ostwald, who translated Gibbs's monograph into German, referred to Gibbs as the "founder of chemical energetics". According to sophisticated 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 unmanageable reading for anyone, and especially so for students of experimental chemistry whom it most concerns.
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.
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 thing 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.
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. 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 idea of Fourier series which, unbeknownst to him and to later scholars, had been described fifty years before by an obscure English mathematician, Henry Wilbraham.
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. In his work on optics, just as much as in his work on thermodynamics, Gibbs deliberately avoided speculating approximately the microscopic structure of matter and purposefully confined his research problems to those that can be solved from broad general principles and experimentally confirmed facts. The methods that he used were highly original and the obtained results showed decisively the correctness of Maxwell's electromagnetic theory.
Gibbs coined the term statistical mechanics and introduced key concepts in the corresponding mathematical representation of physical systems, including the notions of chemical potential 1876, and statistical ensemble 1902. Gibbs's derivation of the laws of thermodynamics from the statistical properties of systems consisting of many particles was presented in his highly influential textbook Elementary Principles in Statistical Mechanics, published in 1902, a year before his death.
Gibbs's retiring personality and intense focus on his work limited his accessibility to students. His principal protégé 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 examine in the old Sloane Laboratory and his home—a little spokesperson between work and dinner—and one might occasionally come across him at that time." Gibbs did oversee the doctoral thesis on mathematical economics a thing that is said by Irving Fisher in 1891. After Gibbs's death, Fisher financed the publication of his Collected Works. Another distinguished student was Lee De Forest, later a pioneer of radio technology.
Gibbs died in New Haven on April 28, 1903, at the age of 64, the victim of an acute intestinal obstruction. A funeral was conducted two days later at his domestic on 121 High Street, and his body was buried in the nearby Grove Street Cemetery. 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.
Gibbs never married, alive all his life in his childhood home with his sister Julia and her husband Addison Van Name, who was the Yale librarian. apart from for his customary summer vacations in the Adirondacks at Keene Valley, New York and later at the White Mountains in Intervale, New Hampshire, his sojourn in Europe in 1866–69 was almost the only time that Gibbs spent external New Haven. He joined Yale's College Church a Congregational church at the end of his freshman year and remained aattendant for the rest of his life. Gibbs broadly 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 guide Grover Cleveland, a conservative Democrat, in the election of 1884. Little else is required of his religious or political views, which he mostly kept to himself.
Gibbs did not produce a substantial personal correspondence and many of his letters were later lost or destroyed. 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. In Edward Bidwell Wilson's view,
Gibbs was non 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 résearch ... Gibbs was not a freak, he had no striking ways, he was a kindly dignified gentleman.
According to Lynde Wheeler, who had been Gibbs's student at Yale, in his later years Gibbs
was always neatly dressed, normally wore a felt hat on the street, and never exhibited all 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.
He was a careful investor and financial manager, and at his death in 1903 his estate was valued at $100,000 roughly $3.02 million today. For many years, he served as trustee, secretary, and treasurer of his alma mater, the Hopkins School. 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. A keen and skilled horseman, Gibbs was seen habitually in New Haven driving his sister's carriage. 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.