The Scientific Papers of J. Willard Gibbs

From the introduction by Henry Andrews Bumstead:

Josiah Willard Gibbs was born in New Haven, Connecticut, February 11, 1839, and died in the same city, April 28, 1903. He graduated from Yale College in 1858, received the degree of doctor of philosophy in 1863 and was appointed a tutor in the college for a term of three years. After his term as tutor he went to Paris (winter 1866/67) and to Berlin (1967), where he heard the lectures of Magnus and other teachers of physics and mathematics.
In 1868 he went to Heidelberg where Kirchhoff and Ostwald 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 he held until the time of his death.

In 1876 and 1878 he published the two parts of the paper "On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances", which is generally considered his most important contribution to physical sciences. It was translated into German in 1881 by Ostwald and into French in 1889 by Le Chatelier.

Outside his scientific activities, J.W. Gibbs's life was uneventful; he made but one visit to Europe, and with the exception of those three years, and of summer vacations in the mountains, his whole life was spent in New Haven. His modesty with regard to his work was proverbial among all who knew him; there was never any tendency to make the importance of his work an excuse for neglecting even the most trivial of his duties, and he was never too busy to devote, at once, as much time and energy as might be necessary to any of his students who sought his assistance.

Bibliography

1873: Graphical methods in the thermodynamics of fluids. Transactions of the Connecticut Academy, ii:309-342.

The symbols used by J.W. Gibbs

Name	modern conventional notation	in Gibb's original
Temperature [K]	T	t
Pressure	P	p
Volume	V	v
Amount of a component	ni	mn
Internal Energy	U
Entropy	S
Free Energy	F
Enthalpy	H
Gibbs Free Energy (Free Enthalpy)	G
Chemical Potential	µi	µm

Some equations and citations

I. For the equilibrium of any isolated system ist is necessary and sufficient that in all possible variations of the state of the system which do not alter its energy, the variation of its entropy shall either vanish or be negative.

(1)

The origin of the Gibbs-Duhem Equation