to support Grover Cleveland, a conservative Democrat, in the election of 1884. Little else is known of his religious or political views, which he mostly kept to himself. Gibbs did not produce a substantial personal correspondence and many of his letters were later lost or destroyed. Beyond the technical writings concerning his research, he published only two other pieces: a brief obituary for Rudolf Clausius, one of the founders of the mathematical theory of thermodynamics, and a longer biographical memoir of his mentor at Yale, H. A. Newton. In Edward Bidwell Wilson's view, According to Lynde Wheeler, who had been Gibbs's student at Yale, in his later years Gibbs He was a careful investor and financial manager, and at his death in 1903 his estate was valued at $100,000 (roughly $ today). For many years, he served as trustee, secretary, and treasurer of his alma mater, the Hopkins School. US President Chester A. Arthur appointed him as one of the commissioners to the National Conference of Electricians, which convened in Philadelphia in September 1884, and Gibbs presided over one of its sessions. A keen and skilled horseman, Gibbs was seen habitually in New Haven driving his sister's carriage. In an obituary published in the American Journal of Science, Gibbs's former student Henry A. Bumstead referred to Gibbs's personal character: Major scientific contributions Chemical and electrochemical thermodynamics Gibbs's papers from the 1870s introduced the idea of expressing the internal energy U of a system in terms of the entropy S, in addition to the usual state-variables of volume V, pressure p, and temperature T. He also introduced the concept of the chemical potential of a given chemical species, defined to be the rate of the increase in U associated with the increase in the number N of molecules of that species (at constant entropy and volume). Thus, it was Gibbs who first combined the first and second laws of thermodynamics by expressing the infinitesimal change in the internal energy, dU, of a closed system in the form: where T is the absolute temperature, p is the pressure, dS is an infinitesimal change in entropy and dV is an infinitesimal change of volume. The last term is the sum, over all the chemical species in a chemical reaction, of the chemical potential, μi, of the ith species, multiplied by the infinitesimal change in the number of moles, dNi of that species. By