Julian Gibbs

Julian Howard Gibbs (June 24, 1924 – February 20, 1983) was an American physical chemist and the fifteenth President of Amherst College. He was a pioneer in developing theoretical models for the glass transition.

In 1942, he entered Amherst College, In 1946, he married Cora Lee Gethman (1924-2016), daughter of YMCA officials who graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Smith College with a degree in art history in the same year and later served as a director of Newport Art Museum.

Starting from 1956, he published seminal articles on glass transition. Together with Edmund A. DiMarzio, he developed the thermodynamic basis for the glass transition, suggesting a second-order phase transition underlying the observed kinetic slowdown. Gibbs-DiMarzio theory remains influential and continues to be debated and refined.

He was named a full professor in 1963 and served as the chairman of the Chemistry Department at Brown from 1964 to 1972.

In 1965, Gerold Adam and he explained the dramatic increase in viscosity characteristic in glass-forming liquids at lower temperatures. They posited that molecular motion must become increasingly cooperative during cooling, requiring larger groups of molecules to move simultaneously, thus decreasing the configurational entropy and creating higher energy barriers. The Adam-Gibbs equation connects this entropy to the relaxation time and is now applied well beyond polymer chemistry.

In 1967 he won the High Polymer Prize of the American Physical Society. He succeeded John William Ward in 1979 as President of Amherst College and served as president for five years until his death in 1983 due to a heart attack. He continued his chemical research while he was president. The Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College holds a collection of his papers.