Willard Gibbs worked unpaid at Yale while reshaping physics and chemistry
For nearly a decade Yale's professor of mathematical physics drew no salary, and his first papers appeared in a local journal few could follow. Yet Willard Gibbs co-founded statistical mechanics, turned physical chemistry into a deductive science, and was later hailed by Einstein as the greatest mind in American history.
Gibbs was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on February 11, 1839, the only son among five children in an old Yankee family of clergymen and scholars. His father, a professor of sacred literature at Yale, is best remembered as the abolitionist who found an interpreter for the Africans of the Amistad, letting them testify at their trial. Young Willard entered Yale at 15, won prizes in mathematics and Latin, and stayed on as a graduate student. Weak lungs and astigmatism, for which he ground his own lenses, kept him out of the Civil War.
In 1863 his thesis on the shape of gear teeth earned him the first American doctorate in engineering, only the fifth PhD awarded in the country in any field. He patented a railway brake, then spent three years in Europe with his sisters, hearing Liouville in Paris and Weierstrass and Kronecker in Berlin. Back at Yale he was named professor of mathematical physics in 1871, the first such chair in the country. Financially independent after his father's death, he was hired to teach only graduate students and received no pay.
His first paper came in 1873, using diagrams of thermodynamic quantities rather than mechanical models. James Clerk Maxwell responded enthusiastically and devoted a chapter to Gibbs in the next edition of his textbook. Gibbs then wrote On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances, issued in two parts in 1875 and 1878: some three hundred pages holding exactly seven hundred numbered equations, opening with Clausius's statement that the world's energy is constant and its entropy tends to a maximum.
When Johns Hopkins offered him $3,000 a year in 1880, Yale countered with $2,000, and he happily stayed. With Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann he built statistical mechanics, a term he coined, deriving thermodynamics from the behaviour of vast numbers of particles. In 1901 he received the Royal Society's Copley Medal. He died on April 28, 1903, having rarely left New Haven.
Source: Josiah Willard Gibbs
