Gibbs, Josiah Willard

Gibbs, Josiah Willard (1839–1903), foremost mathematical physicist in nineteenth‐century America.Born in New Haven, Connecticut, the son and namesake of a professor of philology at Yale College, Gibbs was the first of a new breed of physicists in America who were also highly trained in advanced mathematics. He received the first engineering Ph.D. awarded by an American institution, the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, in 1863. After three years spent studying physics and mathematics abroad in Paris, Berlin, and Heidelberg, Gibbs returned to his beloved New Haven, where he served as professor of mathematical physics at Yale from 1871 until his death.

Equally at home parsing Latin and doing mathematics, Gibbs published his main contribution to physics in the obscure pages of the Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences: “On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances” (1876–1878), a two‐part work that became the cornerstone of the field of physical chemistry. Although James Clerk Maxwell, the great Scottish physicist, early recognized Gibbs's brilliance, a full appreciation of his achievement came only posthumously. It took a new generation of industrial and pharmaceutical chemists wielding the “Gibbs Phase Rule”—specifying the number of solids, liquids, and gases present in complex chemical processes at equilibrium—to rediscover and champion his contributions. Because he made no assumptions about the ultimate nature of matter and based his system on a strictly phenomenological treatment of substances, his work avoided later controversies about the interpretation of thermodynamic functions and the statistical nature of quantum theory.
See also Mathematics and Statistics; Physical Sciences; Science: Revolutionary War to World War I.

Bibliography

Lynde Phelps Wheeler , Josiah Willard Gibbs: The History of a Great Mind, 1952.
Raymond J. Seeger , J. Willard Gibbs: American Mathematical Physicist Par Excellence, 1974.

David A. Tomlin