"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."
On May 4, 2005, the United States Postal Service issued the American Scientists commemorative postage stamp series, depicting Gibbs, John von Neumann, Barbara McClintock and Richard Feynman.
Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839–1903) was one of the very first American theoretical physicists and chemists. The greatest American scientist of the nineteenth century, without a close second. He devised much of the theoretical foundation for chemical thermodynamics. He spent his entire career at Yale, which awarded him the first American Ph.D. in engineering. The J. Willard Gibbs Professorship in Theoretical Chemistry at Yale was created in his honor. Gibbs invented physical chemistry; he invented vector analysis; he also invented, with some European colleagues (Maxwell and Boltzman), statistical mechanics. Not too shabby! He died before he could be considered for the first Nobel Prize.
Some results from Gibbs’s work in chemical thermodynamics
Gibbs Energy
G = U + pV – TS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbs_free_energy
Chemical potential
Gibbs Phase Rule
F = C – P + 2
The degrees of freedom is the difference between the number of components and the number of phases in a system + 2 for T and p.
Gibbs–Helmholz Equation
Gibbs–Duhem Equation
