Josiah Willard Gibbs - Scientific Recognition

Scientific Recognition

Gibbs worked at a time when there was little tradition of rigorous theoretical science in the United States. His research was not easily understandable to his students or his colleagues and he made no effort to popularize his ideas or to simplify their exposition to make them more accessible. His seminal work on thermodynamics was published mostly in the Transactions of the Connecticut Academy, a journal edited by his librarian brother-in-law, which was little read in the USA and even less so in Europe. When Gibbs submitted his long paper on the equilibrium of heterogeneous substances to the Academy, both Elias Loomis and Hubert Anson Newton protested that they did not understand Gibbs's work at all, but they helped to raise the money needed to pay for the typesetting of the many equations and mathematical symbols in the paper. Funds for the purpose were contributed both by members of the university and by local business and professional men in New Haven.

According to James Gerald Crowther,

in his later years was a tall, dignified gentleman, with a healthy stride and ruddy complexion, performing his share of household chores, approachable and kind (if unintelligible) to students. Gibbs was highly esteemed by his friends, but American science was too preoccupied with practical questions to make much use of his profound theoretical work during his lifetime. He lived out his quiet life at Yale, deeply admired by a few able students but making no immediate impress on American science commensurate with his genius. — J. G. Crowther, 1937

In his autobiography, mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota tells of casually browsing the mathematical stacks of Sterling Library and stumbling on a handwritten mailing list, attached to some of Gibbs's course notes, which listed over two hundred notable scientists of his day, including Poincaré, Hilbert, Boltzmann, and Mach. (Lynde Wheeler reproduces this mailing list in an appendix to his biography of Gibbs.) One may conclude that Gibbs's work was better known among the scientific elite of his day than the published material suggests. Gibbs succeeded in interesting his European correspondents in that work, which was translated into German (then the leading language for chemistry) by Wilhelm Ostwald in 1892 and into French by Henri Louis Le Châtelier in 1899. His phase rule was experimentally validated by the works of Dutch chemist H. W. Bakhuis Roozeboom, who showed how to apply it in a variety of situations, thereby assuring it of widespread use.

Gibbs did receive the major honors then possible for an academic scientist in the US: he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1879 and was awarded the 1880 Rumford Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for his work on chemical thermodynamics. Gibbs was also granted honorary doctorates from Princeton University and Williams College in the US, and from the universities of Erlangen and Christiania (now Oslo) in Europe. He was inducted as a foreign member of the Royal Society of London in 1897 and received the Society's Copley Medal in 1901. At the time, that was considered the highest international honor in the natural sciences. Gibbs was also a corresponding member of the Prussian and French Academies of Science.