Today is the birthday of Josiah Willard Gibbs who was born in 1839 in New Haven, Connecticut. Gibbs was a prodigious theoretician who worked primarily in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics (a term he coined). In 1863, at Yale he earned the first PhD in engineering (and the fifth in any subject) granted in the US. After a few years in Europe, he returned to Yale in 1871 as a professor of mathematical physics and worked there until his death. Gibbs's influence on thermodynamics was so significant that a wide range of his terminology and notation is still in use today. At the time much of his work was not widely understood because of the complexity and theoretical approach to what was then a mostly phenomenological science, but James Clerk Maxwell was a quick supporter of Gibbs's work. Later, Gibbs also independently developed vector calculus and made contributions to physical optics. In 1901 he was awarded the Royal Society of London's Copley Medal, the highest international scientific award at the time (until the Nobel).