Monograph

By: J. Willard Gibbs

Date: 1902

Source: Gibbs, J. Willard. Elementary Principles in Statistical Mechanics. New York: Scribner's, 1902. Reprint, Wood-bridge, Conn.: Ox Bow Press, 1981, vi–viii.

About the Author: Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839–1903) was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and received a Ph.D. in engineering in 1863 from Yale University. After studying mathematics and physics in Europe, he became professor of mathematical physics at Yale in 1871. Thereafter he seldom left New Haven, living the rest of his life in the house where he had been born.

Introduction

The seventeenth-century classical physics of Isaac Newton culminated in the nineteenth century in three grand theories that absorbed the attention of J. Willard Gibbs: thermodynamics, kinetic theory, and statistical mechanics. At mid-century scientists had formalized the first law...