J. Willard Gibbs is not as famous as the Europeans who discovered and lionized him. James Clerk Maxwell was the first and for a time nearly the only major scientist among his contemporaries to fully understand Gibbs' publications and what they implied. Albert Einstein called him "the greatest mind in American history." Gibbs' studies of thermodynamicsand electromagneticsand discoveries in statistical mechanics made Einstein's later theories conceivable. He is also largely responsible for the field of physical chemistry, which impacted the steel and ammonia industries. Gibbs is known as the "father of vector analysis" for replacing William Rowan Hamilton's quaternions in the field of mathematical physics. Thanks to him there are such ideas as the Gibbs phase rule, the Gibbs adsorption isotherm regarding surface tension, Gibbs free energy, and Gibbsian ensembles. Even two short letters to Nature in the late 1890s defined what is now known as the...