Josiah willard gibbs childhood

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Rukeyser 1998, p. Gibbs's given name, which he shared 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.[5]

The elder Gibbs was generally known to his family and colleagues as "Josiah", while the son was called "Willard".[6] 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.

The Royal Society further honored Gibbs in 1901 with the Copley Medal, then regarded as the highest international award in the natural sciences,[2] noting that he had been "the first to apply the second law of thermodynamics to the exhaustive discussion of the relation between chemical, electrical and thermal energy and capacity for external work."[40] Gibbs, who remained in New Haven, was represented at the award ceremony by Commander Richardson Clover, the US naval attaché in London.[86]

In his autobiography, mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota tells of casually browsing the mathematical stacks of Sterling Library and stumbling on a handwritten mailing list, attached to some of Gibbs's course notes, which listed over two hundred notable scientists of his day, including Poincaré, Boltzmann, David Hilbert, and Ernst Mach.

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Navarro, Luis (1998).

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 nineteenth century and one of the foundations of physical chemistry. ISBN 1-107-00731-3.
Marsden, Jerrold E.; Tromba, Anthony J.

(1988). With this object in mind, Gibbs distinguished between the dot and cross products of two vectors and introduced the concept of dyadics.

The eminent British physicist J. J. Thomson was in attendance and delivered a brief address.^[54]

Personal life and character

Gibbs never married, living all his life in his childhood home with his sister Julia and her husband Addison Van Name, who was the Yale librarian. 33 (28).

Einstein replied: "Lorentz", adding "I never met Willard Gibbs; perhaps, had I done so, I might have placed him beside Lorentz."^[119] Author Bill Bryson in his bestselling popular science book A Short History of Nearly Everything ranks Gibbs as "perhaps the most brilliant person that most people have never heard of".^[120]

In 1958, USS San Carlos was renamed USNS Josiah Willard Gibbs and re-designated as an oceanographic research ship.

"II: Groups and Statistical Mechanics". Physics Today. The History of modern physics, 1800-1950. Los Angeles: Tomash Publishers. Rukeyser called this surface a "statue of water"^[125] and the magazine saw in it "the abstract creation of a great American scientist that lends itself to the symbolism of contemporary art forms."^[126] The artwork by Arthur Lidov also included Gibbs's mathematical expression of the phase rule for heterogeneous mixtures, as well as a radar screen, an oscilloscope waveform, Newton's apple, and a small rendition of a three-dimensional phase diagram.^[126]

Gibbs's nephew, Ralph Gibbs Van Name, a professor of physical chemistry at Yale, was unhappy with Rukeyser's biography, in part because of her lack of scientific training.

73. This was finally unveiled in 1912, in the form of a bronze bas-relief by sculptor Lee Lawrie, installed in the Sloane Physics Laboratory.[103] In 1910, the American Chemical Society established the Willard Gibbs Award for eminent work in pure or applied chemistry.[104] In 1923, the American Mathematical Society endowed the Josiah Willard Gibbs Lectureship, "to show the public some idea of the aspects of mathematics and its applications".[105]
Photograph of the J.

W. Gibbs Laboratories, Yale University
Building housing the Josiah Willard Gibbs Laboratories, at Yale University's Science Hill

In 1945, Yale University created the J. Willard Gibbs Professorship in Theoretical Chemistry, held until 1973 by Lars Onsager. Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). 134