Josiah Willard Gibbs

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For Josiah Willard Gibbs, Sr. see Willard Gibbs (linguist).
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Willard Gibbs
Born
February 11, 1839
New Haven, Connecticut, USA

Josiah Willard Gibbs (February 11, 1839 – April 28, 1903) was an American mathematical physicist who contributed much of the theoretical foundation for chemical thermodynamics. As a mathematician, he was an inventor of vector analysis. He was the first person in the United States of America to receive a PhD in engineering (Yale).

Contents

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Biography

Gibbs' scientific career can be divided into four phases:

He also wrote classic textbooks on this last subject.

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Early years

Image:A young Willard Gibbs.jpg Gibbs was the seventh in a long line of American academics stretching back to the 17th century. His father, a professor of sacred literature at the Yale Divinity School, is now most remembered for his involvement in the Amistad trial. (Although his father was also named Josiah Willard, the son is never referred to as "Josiah Willard Gibbs, Jr.") His mother, alternatively, was the daughter of a literary graduate of Yale University. Gibbs attended the Hopkins School and Yale College, graduating in 1858 very high in his class and receiving prizes in mathematics and Latin.

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Middle years

Gibbs obtained the first Ph.D. degree in engineering in the USA, 1863. He then tutored in Yale College: two years in Latin and a year in what was then called natural philosophy. In 1866 he went to Europe to study, spending one year each at Paris, Berlin, and Heidelberg, where he was influenced by the luminaries Kirchhoff and Helmholtz. Germany was then the leading nation in chemistry, thermodynamics, and theoretical natural science in general. These three years account for nearly all of his life spent outside of New Haven.

Image:Thermodynamicist Willard Gibbs.jpg In 1869 he returned to Yale and was appointed Professor of Mathematical Physics in 1871, the first such professorship in the United States, and a position he held for the rest of his life. The appointment was unpaid at first, a situation common in Germany and otherwise not unusual at the time; a reason was that Gibbs had yet to publish anything. Between 1876 and 1878 Gibbs wrote a series of papers collectively titled On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances, now deemed one of the greatest scientific achievements of the 19th century and a founding paper of physical chemistry. In these papers Gibbs applied thermodynamics to interpret physicochemical phenomena, successfully explaining and interrelating what had heretofore been a mass of isolated facts.

"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 any one, and especially so for students of experimental chemistry whom it most concerns... " (J J O'Connor and E F Robertson, J. Willard Gibbs)

Gibbs then turned to the development and presentation of his theory of thermodynamics. In 1873, Gibbs published a paper on the geometric representation of thermodynamic quantities. This paper inspired Maxwell to make (with his own hands) a plaster cast illustrating Gibbs' construct which he then sent to Gibbs. Yale proudly owns it to this day.

Gibbs published his classic paper "On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances" in two installments in 1876 and 1878. Some important topics covered in his other papers on heterogeneous equilibria include:

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Later years

In 1880, the new Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland offered Gibbs a position paying $3000. Yale responded by raising his salary to $2000, and he did not leave New Haven. From 1880 to 1884, Gibbs combined the ideas of two mathematicians, the quaternions of William Rowan Hamilton and the exterior algebra of Hermann Grassmann to obtain vector analysis (independently formulated by the British mathematical physicist and engineer Oliver Heaviside). Gibbs designed vector analysis to clarify and advance mathematical physics.

From 1882 to 1889, Gibbs both refined his vector analysis and researched optics, developing a new electrical theory of light. He deliberately avoided theorizing about the structure of matter (a wise decision, given the revolutionary developments in subatomic particles and quantum mechanics that began around the time of his death), developing a theory of greater generality than any theory of matter extant in his day would imply. After 1889, Gibbs wrote classic textbooks on statistical mechanics, which Yale published in 1902. Other areas Gibbs contributed to include crystallography and the determinism of planetary and comet orbits, the latter being an application of his vector methods.

Information about the names and careers of Gibbs's Yale students is not readily available. He is known to have strongly influenced the education of the economist Irving Fisher, who completed a Yale Ph.D. in 1896.

Gibbs never married, living all his life in his childhood home with a sister and his brother-in-law, the Yale librarian.

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Scientific recognition

Image:Josiah Willard Gibbs.jpg Recognition was slow in coming, in good part because Gibbs published mainly in the Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Sciences, a journal, edited by his librarian brother-in-law, little read in the USA and less so in Europe. At first, only a few European theoretical physicists and chemists, such as the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, paid any attention to his work. Only when Gibbs's papers were translated into German (then the leading language for chemistry) by Wilhelm Ostwald in 1892, and into French by Henri Louis le Chatelier in 1899, did his ideas received wide currency in Europe.

The situation in his native America was even quieter. During Gibbs's lifetime, American secondary schools and colleges emphasized classics rather than science, students tended to take little interest in Gibbs's lectures. (The notions that scientific teaching and research are a fundamental part of the modern university arose in Germany during the 19th century, and only gradually spread from there to the USA.) The result was a situation described as follows:

"In his later years he 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." (Crowther 1969: nnn)

Gibbs died soon after the inauguration of the Nobel Prize and so did not win it. He did receive, however, the highest possible honor granted by the international scientific community of his day, the Copley Medal of the Royal Society of the United Kingdom, in 1901.

In 1945, Yale University created the J. Willard Gibbs Professorship in Theoretical Chemistry, held until 1973 by Lars Onsager, who won the 1968 Nobel Prize in chemistry. This appointment was a very fitting one, as Onsager was primarily involved, like Gibbs, in the application of new mathematical ideas to problems in physical chemistry, especially statistical mechanics.

On May 4, 2005 the United States Postal Service issued the American Scientists commemorative postage stamp series, depicting Josiah Willard Gibbs, John von Neumann, Barbara McClintock and Richard Feynman.

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See also

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Quotations

  • "Mathematics is a language." (reportedly spoken by Gibbs at a Yale faculty meeting)
  • "A mathematician may say anything he pleases, but a physicist must be at least partially sane."
  • "It has been said that 'the human mind has never invented a labor-saving machine equal to algebra.' If this be true, it is but natural and proper that an age like our own, characterized by the multiplication of labor-saving machinery, should be distinguished by the unexampled development of this most refined and most beautiful of machines." (1887, quoted in Meinke and Tucker 1992: 190)
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Further reading

Online bibliography.

Primary:

Secondary :

  • American Institute of Physics, 2003 (1976). Josiah Willard Gibbs 1839-1903.
  • Bumstead, H. A., 1903, "Josiah Willard Gibbs," American Journal of Science XVI(4).
  • Crowther, J. G., 1969. Famous American Men of Science. ISBN 0836900405
  • Donnan, F. G., and A. E. Haas, 1936. A Commentary on the Scientific Writings of J Willard Gibbs. ISBN 0405125445
  • Longley, W. R., and R. G. Van Name, eds., 1928. The Collected Works of J Willard Gibbs.
  • Muriel Rukeyser, 1942. Willard Gibbs: American Genius. ISBN 0918024579. Reprinted by the Ox Bow Press, Woodbridge, CT, ISBN 0-918024-57-9.
  • Seeger, Raymond John, 1974. J. Willard Gibbs, American mathematical physicist par excellence. Pergamon Press. ISBN 0080180132
  • Wheeler, L. P., 1952. Josiah Willard Gibbs, The History of a Great Mind. ISBN 1881987116
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External articles and references

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Cited material

  • Template:Note J J O'Connor and E F Robertson, "J. Willard Gibbs".
  • Meinke, K., and Tucker, J. V., 1992, "Universal Algebra" in Abramsky, S., Gabbay, D., and Maibaum, T. S. E., eds., Handbook of Logic in Computer Science: Vol. I. Oxford Uni. Press: 189-411.
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General

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