 | J. Willard Gibbs |
The contributions of renowned physicist, chemist and mathematician J. Willard Gibbs will be honored at a symposium at Yale on Friday, Feb. 28.
The symposium, which honors Gibbs' most important work on the 100th anniversary of his death in 1903, will take place at 1 p.m. in Davies Auditorium, Becton Engineering and Applied Science Center, 15 Prospect St. It is free and open to the public.
The event is sponsored by the Faculty of Engineering; the Departments of Physics, Chemistry, History of Science and Medicine; and the Provost's Office. It will feature lectures from researchers around the world.
"Celebrating Gibbs' contributions is part of our effort to foster scholarly communication between the science and technology community and the humanities and social sciences," says Daniel Kevles, the Stanley Woodward Professor of History, who coordinated and will speak at the symposium.
"Gibbs is certainly Yale's greatest scientist but many would argue that he is also America's foremost scientist, albeit little known outside the physical and mathematical sciences," says Pierre Hohenberg, deputy provost for science and technology at Yale.
Speakers at the symposium and their lecture topics are: Ole Knudsen, University of Arrhus, Denmark, "Gibbs in Europe"; Diana Kormos Buchwald, California Institute of Technology, "Who Reads Gibbs: Physical Chemistry at the Turn of the Century"; Martin Klein, Yale University, "Gibbs and Statistical Mechanics a Century Ago"; and Daniel J. Kevles, "Engineering and Physics in Gibbs' America."
Gibbs was born in New Haven in 1839. He was the seventh in an unbroken line of American academics stretching back to the 17th century. His father was a professor of philology at Yale, noted for his role as the translator for the Amistad trial. Gibbs studied mechanical engineering at Yale and in 1863 earned the first Ph.D. in engineering in the United States. His thesis looked at shaping gear teeth. He taught at Yale and held patents for railway brake systems and other mechanical devices. Gibbs studied mathematics and physics in Paris, Berlin and Heidelberg from 1866 to 1869.
Based on his studies, Gibbs applied mathematical reasoning to the experimentally determined behavior of gases, creating the entire subject of thermodynamics. He further developed thermodynamics' fundamental basis in the behavior of large groups or ensembles of particles and formulated statistical mechanics. He developed both subjects as far as classical mechanics permitted.
Gibbs' other achievements include significant contributions to mathematics. Building upon the work of Hermann Grassmann, Gibbs developed the familiar use of vector analysis. His seminal work in thermodynamics is recognized in the quantity known as the "Gibbs Free Energy," an important concept for determining the characteristics of chemical equilibrium.
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