Josiah willard gibbs accomplishments meaning

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Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

Gibbs as a young man.

josiah willard gibbs accomplishments meaning

—William James, American psychologist and philosopher

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)

See also

  • Science: Information theory, Information entropy
  • Electricity: Maxwell's equations
  • Mathematics: Gibbs phenomenon, Vector Analysis (Gibbs/Wilson), cross product
  • Physical chemistry: Matter phase, Gibbs phase rule, Statistical mechanics, Free energy
  • Named for Gibbs: Gibbs free energy, Gibbs entropy, Gibbs inequality, Gibbs paradox, Gibbs-Helmholtz equation, Gibbs algorithm, Gibbs distribution, Gibbs state, Gibbs sampling, Gibbs-Marangoni effect, Gibbs-Duhem relation, Gibbs phenomenon, Gibbs-Donnan effect
  • People: Gilbert N.

    Lewis, William Rowan Hamilton, Lars Onsager, Ludwig Boltzmann, William Stanley, Oliver Heaviside

  • Other: Copley Medal, Yale University, Grove Street Cemetery
  • Lists: List of physicists, Timeline of thermodynamics, List of physics topics, List of notable textbooks in statistical mechanics

References

  1. ^Wheeler, Lynde, Phelps (1951).

    Duhem. 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). A plaque near Berkeley College marks the site where his house once stood.

    As a mathematician, he was an inventor of vector analysis. Among his (few) biographers was the poet and political activist Muriel Rukeyser. 

    Why a poet? ISBN 0918024773

  2. Google. These three years account for nearly all of his life spent outside New Haven. Oxford Univ. Josiah Willard Gibbs, The History of a Great Mind.

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    Ed Hoop

    The J. W. Gibbs Research Laboratories, on Science Hill, housed decades’ worth of research but have become outdated.

—Albert Einstein, German-Swiss physicist

—Wilhelm Ostwald, German chemist

They laugh best who laugh last.

ISBN 0405125445

  • Hastings, Charles S. ,1909. He introduced the "phase rule," which predicts the number of phases that a substance can manifest at a particular temperature and pressure. He tutored for three years at Yale, two years in Latin and one year in natural philosophy, or what is today called physics.

    Unless you’re familiar with his field, you’d never hear his name.

    But which field?

    Gibbs never married, living all his life in his childhood home with a sister and his brother-in-law, the Yale librarian. Rudolph Clausius, Maxwell, and Ludwig Boltzmann also contributed to the foundations of statistical mechanics. He sent the finished work to Gibbs.