Page:Scientific Papers of Josiah Willard Gibbs.djvu/22

xiv father's side we find an unbroken line of six college graduates. Five of these were graduates of Harvard.— President Samuel Willard, his son Josiah Willard, the great grandfather, grandfather and father of the elder Professor Gibbs, who was himself a graduate of Yale. Among his mother's ancestors were two more Yale graduates, one of whom, Rev. Jonathan Dickinson, was the first President of the College of New Jersey.

Josiah Willard Gibbs, the younger, entered Yale College in 1854 and was graduated in 1858, receiving during his college course several prizes for excellence in Latin and Mathematics; during the next five years he continued his studies in New Haven, and in 1863 received the degree of doctor of philosophy and was appointed a tutor in the college for a term of three years. During the first two years of his tutorship he taught Latin and the third year Natural Philosophy, in both of which subjects he had gained marked distinction as an undergraduate. At the end of his term as tutor he went abroad with his sisters, spending the winter 1866-67 in Paris and the following years in Berlin, where he heard the lectures of Magnus and other teachers of physics and mathematics. In 1868 he went to Heidelberg, where Kirchhoff and Helmholtz were then stationed, returning to New Haven in June, 1869. Two years later he was appointed Professor of Mathematical Physics in Yale College, a position which he held until the time of his death.

It was not until 1873, when he was thirty-four years old, that he gave to the world, by publication, evidence of his extraordinary powers as an investigator in mathematical physics. In that year two papers appeared in the Transactions of the Connecticut Academy, the first being entitled "Graphical Methods in the Thermodynamics of Fluids," and the second "A Method of Geometrical Representation of the Thermodynamic Properties of Substances by Means of Surfaces." These were followed in 1876 and 1878 by the two parts of the great paper "On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances," which is generally, and probably rightly, considered his most important contribution to physical science, and which is unquestionably among the greatest and most enduring monuments of the wonderful scientific activity of the nineteenth century. The first two papers of this series, although somewhat overshadowed by the third, are themselves very remarkable and valuable contributions to the theory of thermodynamics; they have proved useful and fertile in many direct ways, and, in addition, it is difficult to see how, without them, the third could have been written. In logical development the three are very closely connected, and methods first brought forward in the earlier papers are used continually in the third.

Professor Gibbs was much inclined to the use of geometrical