Josiah Wilder Gibbs

On February 11, 1839, American physicist chemist Josiah Vilad Gibbs was born. He laid the foundations of chemical thermodynamics, proposing Gibbs' free energy to line with Gibbs. He founded vector analysis and introduced it into mathematical physics.

character brief introduction

Gibbs was born in 1839, in New Haven, Connecticut. His ancestors were purists, and emigrated from England to North America in 1658, and Gibbs was the seventh generation. His father was a professor at the Yale University classical literature department, and his mother came from the family of famous scholars. Gibbs was sick and frequently missing classes when he was a teenager, but his parents gave him ¡®home education¡¯. His father taught him Latin and his mother taught him mathematics. His mother liked to ask him questions and then occasionally instructed him to observe, calculate and think until he found the answers, and this unique teaching approach was continually opening up his interest in mathematics. His excellent mathematical achievements made him familiar with the engineering department.

In 1860, the United States began to build railways across the continent. Both the start of the train and the brake wheel require a variety of gear drive, and Gibbs discovered that the use of geometry in gear design can make the gear between the gear more tight and reduce the resistance to friction when turning. This not only reduces fuel, but also makes the train safer when moving fast into the brake.

In 1863, he obtained his PhD in Engineering at Yale College with the title of "Geometry Studies Design Train Engines" and was the first PhD in American history, after which he served as an assistant professor of Latin for two years and an assistant professor of natural philosophy for one year. Gibbs published three classics of thermodynamics at Yale University for three years.

In 1873, at the age of 34, Gibbs published his first important paper using graphics to study the thermodynamics of fluids, and in subsequent papers introduced three-dimensional photography. In 1876, Gibbs published in the Connecticut Academy of Sciences the first part of the classical work on the basis of chemical thermodynamics, The Balance of Non-Equal Objects. In 1878, he completed the second part. This more than three hundred-page paper is considered to be one of the most important papers in the history of chemistry, which put forward the concepts of Gibbs' free energy, chemical tendency and other, explaining the nature of chemical balance, balance, surface absorption and other phenomena.

In 1880-1884, Gibbs combined Hamilton's four-dimensional ideas with Grasman's exotic number theory, and founded vector analysis to solve the problem of cometary orbit, using this method, Gibbs obtained the orbit of the comet of Swift, which required calculations far smaller than Gauss's method. In 1882-1889, Gibbs was clever to avoid the discussion of the nature of light, and applied the vector analysis to establish a new set of electromagnetic theory of light. After 1889, Gibbs wrote a classic textbook on statistical mechanics, The Basic Principles of Statistical Mechanics, and he used Lewis's achievements to expand the concept of Bolseman's synthesis, thus building thermodynamics on the basis of statistical mechanics.