Page:Scientific Papers of Josiah Willard Gibbs.djvu/27

Rh printed in 1881 and 1884 a very concise account of the vector analysis which he had developed, and this pamphlet was to some extent circulated among those especially interested in the subject. In the development of this system the author had been led to study deeply the Ausdehnungslehere of Grassmann, and the subject of multiple algebra in general; these investigations interested him greatly up to the time of his death, and he has often remarked that he had more pleasure in the study of multiple algebra than in any other of his intellectual activities. His rejection of quaternions, and his championship of Grassmann's claim to be considered the founder of modern algebra, led to some papers of a somewhat controversial character, most of which appeared in the columns of Nature. When the utility of his system as an instrument for physical research had been proved by twenty years' experience of himself and of his pupils, Professor Gibbs consented, though somewhat reluctantly, to its formal publication in much more extended form than in the original pamphlet. As he was at that time wholly occupied with another work, the task of preparing this treatise for publication was entrusted to one of his students, Dr. E. B. Wilson, whose very successful accomplishment of the work entitles him to the gratitude of all who are interested in the subject.

The reluctance of Professor Gibbs to publish his system of vector analysis certainly did not arise from any doubt in his own mind as to its utility, or the desirability of its being more widely employed; it seemed rather to be due to the feeling that it was not an original contribution to mathematics, but was rather an adaptation, for special purposes, of the work of others. Of many portions of the work this is of course necessarily true, and it is rather by the selection of methods and by systematization of the presentation that the author has served the cause of vector analysis. But in the treatment of the linear vector function and the theory of dyadics to which this leads, a distinct advance was made which was of consequence not only in the more restricted field of vector analysis, but also in the broader theory of multiple algebra in general.

The theory of dyadics as developed in the vector analysis of 1884 must be regareded as the most important published contribution of Professor Gibbs to pure mathematics. For the vector analysis as an algebra does not fulfil the definition of the linear associative algebras of Benjamin Peirce, since the scalar product of vectores lies outside the vector domain; nor is it a geometrical analysis in the sense of