Josiah Willard Gibbs

FEB 01, 1949

First coming upon Gibbs through the writing of a poem, Muriel Rukeyser was drawn into a study of his work and later wrote his biography. In this article on the founder of statistical mechanics, and on imagination, she writes of the man who said, “The whole is simpler than the sum of its parts.” The material from which this was taken was presented as a lecture under the auspices of the University of Chicago and the Institute for Religious and Social Studies.

DOI: 10.1063/1.3066422

Muriel Rukeyser

Willard Gibbs is the type of the imagination at work in the world. His story is that of an opening‐up which has had its effect on our lives and our thinking; and, it seems to me, it is the emblem of the naked imagination—which is called abstract and impractical, but whose discoveries can be used by anyone who is interested, in whatever “field”—an imagination which for me, more than that of any other figure in American thought, any poet, or political, or religious figure, stands for imagination at its essential points.

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Muriel Rukeyser, San Francisco, California.