Background
Gibbs was born on February 11, 1839 in New Haven, Connecticut, to Josiah Willard Gibbs and his wife Mary Anna. He was the fourth of five children.
(Format Hardcover Subject History)
Format Hardcover Subject History
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Gibbs was born on February 11, 1839 in New Haven, Connecticut, to Josiah Willard Gibbs and his wife Mary Anna. He was the fourth of five children.
Willard Gibbs studied at the Hopkins School and then he entered Yale College in 1854.
Prizes in Greek, Latin, and mathematics marked Josiah Gibbs' progress as an undergraduate at Yale, and after receiving his Ph. D. in engineering in 1863 he remained in New Haven for three more years as a tutor in both Latin and mathematics. In 1866-1869, he studied at the Universities of Paris, Berlin, and Heidelberg and became acquainted with some of the leading figures in the world of mathematics.
Two years after his return to New Haven Gibbs was appointed to the chair of mathematical physics at Yale, which he held until his death.
Gibbs' first contributions to thermodynamics were developed in two papers published in 1873, Graphical Methods in the Thermodynamics of Fluids and Methods of Geometrical Representation of the Thermodynamic Properties of Substances by Means of Surfaces, in which he employed diagrams and models to represent the thermodynamic qualities of homogenous substances. James Clerk Maxwell, England's foremost physicist at that time, was the first to recognize their value and used a portion of Gibbs' findings as a basis for constructing his own thermodynamic model. Gibbs' monumental work, On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances, published in two parts between 1876 and 1878, marked the begining of chemical thermodynamics. In this work, he placed the theory of phase equilibrium on a firm basis of thermodynamics, formulating the phase rule with which his name is usually associated.
This rule made possible the determination of 1) the exact concentration of various substances and the heat and pressure conditions required to produce certain mixtures (such as chemical solutions and metal alloys) whose components would remain in equilibrium with one another, 2) what these equilibrium conditions would be, and 3) the conditions under which one or more components of a complex mixture might be separated.
Gibbs' exhaustive work provided the basis for the subsequent development of physical chemistry. At the time this work was published, scientific discoveries had scarcely begun to make an impact on industry and it was many years before the practical implications of his research became apparent.
Among the important applications of the theories were the investigations of steel alloys by Hendrik Willem Bakhuis Roozeboom in Holland, the synthesis of ammonia by Fritz Haber in Germany, and the synthesis of petroleum. Although Gibbs sensed the potential value of his research, he did not attempt to exploit the industrial application of his theories. During the 1880's Gibbs was attracted to Sir William Rowan Hamilton's work on quaternions and Hermann Gunther Grassman's work on geometric algebra. By modifying their theories and combining them with his own, he created vector analysis, an important mathematical tool that is especially useful to the physicist. His last important work, Elementary Principles in Statistical Mechanics, was published in 1902.
(Format Hardcover Subject History)
Gibbs never married, living all his life in his childhood home with his sister Julia and her husband.
