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When Josiah Willard Gibbs died in 1903, a European physicist described him as “the greatest synthetic philosopher since Newton.”. And this was before scientists really understood the full importance of his work. Admirers have since given Gibbs’s name to a crater on the moon, a US Navy research vessel (now retired), and an annual medal ...
- Willard Was from An Intellectual Family
- He Was Quiet But Impactful
- Willard Was A Simple Man
- Einstein called Him The Greatest Mind in American History
- Willard Did Not Volunteer in The Civil War
- He Was A Loner
- Willard Is Not Given The Recognition He Deserves
- His Work Was Full of Symbols That Were Hard to Deduce
- Willard Was A Mentor to Great Minds
- He Was The First American to Be Awarded A Phd in Engineering
Willard came from a prosperous and intellectual family. It had produced distinguished American clergymen and academics since the 17th century. His mother had come from an eminent family and was an amateur ornithologist. His father was an expert on languages and linguistics. He was also a Professor of Sacred Literature at Yale University’s School of...
Socially, Gibbs was quiet and bookish, a somewhat reserved student. Academically, he was brilliant. There was a huge contrast between Gibbs’s quiet, solitary life in turn of the century New England, and the great international impact of his ideas. His work was mostly theoretical. The practical side became evident with the development of industrial ...
When his mother died, she left Willard and his sisters a sizable inheritance. Willard rarely left America except for his annual summer holidays in northern New England. Other times when he had to leave New Haven were to lecture or attend a meeting. He lived and lived in the house in which he had grown up. The house was less than a block away from t...
Albert Einstein was initially not aware of Willard’s work. He wrote and published some papers on statistical mechanics. After reading Willard’s work, he declared that it was superior to his. He continued to say that he would not have written his papers if he had known Willard’s existed. Einstein was a widely acknowledged scientist. He is said to be...
Willard was a sickly child. He often had pulmonary problems. Physicians were often afraid that he would die of tuberculosis just like his mother had. He also suffered from astigmatism. This ailment is an imperfection in the curvature of the eye that causes blurred distance and near vision. Today this disease is treatable but in those days it was un...
Willard spent his whole life living in the same house that his father had built. It was only a short distance from the school Gibbs had attended. It was also the same one that he worked for his whole life. The only time he had left home was in his early days for Europe. Occasional summer vacations here and there were it. He joined a church when in ...
He worked at a time when rigorous theoretical science was not popular in the United States. Many did not understand his work. He made no effort to popularize, simplify it or make it easily accessible. Dutch physicist J. D. van der Waals received the 1910 Nobel Prize for his work on the equation of state for gases and liquids. He acknowledged the gr...
His edited work was published in a not so read journal. He submitted his long paper on the equilibrium of heterogeneous substances. Both Elias Loomis and H. A. Newton protested that they did not understand Gibbs’s work at all. They did help raise the money needed to pay for the typesetting of the many mathematical symbols in the paper. When he publ...
Willard was a mentor to several people who in turn made great advancements in science. At Yale, Lee De Forest went on to invent the triode amplifier. He is called the father of radio. Another student of Gibbs, Lynde Wheeler, played a significant role in the development of radio technology. Willard also had an indirect influence on mathematical econ...
In 1863, Gibbs received the first Doctorate of Philosophy in engineering granted in the US. This was after writing a thesis entitled On the Form of the Teeth of Wheels in Spur Gearing.He used geometrical techniques to investigate the optimum design for gears. In 1861, Yale had become the first US University to offer a Ph.D. degree. He became the fi...
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Feb 15, 2020 · Josiah Willard Gibbs was born in New Haven on February 11, 1839, the only son of five children born to Josiah and Mary Anna (Van Cleve) Gibbs. Gibbs came from a prestigious family of clergymen and academics and his father was a linguist and theologian who is best remembered as the abolitionist who found an interpreter for the African captives ...
Nov 30, 2015 · Josiah Willard Gibbs was born to Josiah Gibbs Sr. and Mary Anna Van Cleve on February 11, 1839 in New Haven, Connecticut. As a child he lived a relatively privileged life with his four older sisters. Education was encouraged in his family as not only was his father a professor at Yale, but also had one relative who held a position as president ...
Feb 11, 2020 · February 11, 2020. Josiah Willard Gibbs, an American physical scientist, was born Feb. 11, 1839. His name is often unrecognized by the public, yet Gibbs was unarguably the greatest scientist America produced up through the end of the 19th century, and perhaps beyond. His field was thermodynamics, which might explain the poor name recognition ...
The case of Willard Gibbs shows that this weakness was due to tradition and training, not to any lack of native talent. Gibbs, son of a Yale professor of sacred literature, descended from a long line of New England college graduates. He studied at Yale, received his Ph.D. there in 1863—one of the first doctorates granted in the United States ...
Abstract. Josiah Willard Gibbs was the first distinguished American theoretician of physics and the first theoretical physical chemist. As testimony to this, on April 21,1879, he was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences. This organization was a body that had emerged from the strife of the Civil War and was open only to the ...
