Josiah Willard Gibbs - Commemoration

Commemoration

When the German physical chemist Walther Nernst visited Yale in 1906 to give the Silliman lecture, he was surprised to discover that there was no tangible memorial for Gibbs. He therefore donated his $500 lecture fee to the university to help pay for a suitable monument, which was finally unveiled in 1912 in the form of a bronze bas-relief by sculptor Lee Lawrie, installed in the Sloane Physics Laboratory. In 1910, the American Chemical Society established the Willard Gibbs Medal, through the initiative of William A. Converse, a former chairman and secretary of the Chicago Section. The American Mathematical Society endowed the Josiah Willard Gibbs Lectureship in 1923 to increase public awareness of mathematics and its applications.

In 1945, Yale University created the J. Willard Gibbs Professorship in Theoretical Chemistry, held until 1973 by Lars Onsager, who won the 1968 Nobel Prize in chemistry. (Onsager, like Gibbs, worked primarily on the application of new mathematical ideas to problems in physical chemistry.) Yale's Josiah Willard Gibbs Laboratories and its J. Willard Gibbs Assistant Professorship in Mathematics are also named in his honor, and the university has hosted two symposia dedicated to Gibbs's life and work, one in 1989 and another on the centenary of his death, in 2003. Rutgers University has a J. Willard Gibbs Professorship of Thermomechanics, presently held by Bernard D. Coleman.

In 1950, Gibbs was elected to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. The United States Navy oceanographic research ship USNS Josiah Willard Gibbs (T-AGOR-1), in service from 1958 to 1971, was named for Gibbs.

E. A. Guggenheim introduced the symbol G for the Gibbs free energy in 1933, and the same symbol was used also by Dirk ter Haar in 1966. This notation is now universal and is recommended by the IUPAC. In 1960, William Giauque et al. suggested using the name "gibbs" (abbreviated gbs.) for the unit of entropy, calorie / Kelvin, but this usage did not become common and the corresponding SI unit, Joule / Kelvin, carries no special name.