Willard Gibbs: The Whole Is Simpler Than Its Parts

Willard Gibbs: The Whole Is Simpler Than Its Parts

Rukeyser Muriel, Maria Popova (Foreword By)
$32.00
Publish Date:
Publisher:
McNally Editions
ISBN:
9781961341159
Pages:
480
Language:
English
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About the Author

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) was a prolific poet, playwright, biographer, novelist, children’s book author, and political activist. Her first collection of poetry, 1935's Theory of Flight, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize. During her life she was the recipient of a National Institute of Arts and Letters award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Levinson Prize for Poetry, and the Shelley Memorial Award, among other honors. 

Maria Popova is a reader and a writer, and is curator and editor of Marginalian Editions. She writes about what she reads on her website The Marginalian. She grew up in Bulgaria immersed in music and mathematics.

Praise for Willard Gibbs: The Whole Is Simpler Than Its Parts

“Willard Gibbs is, in my opinion, one of the most original and important creative minds in the field of science America has produced.”
— Albert Einstein

“A quiet, mousy man who changed the foundations of the world by a few formulae scribbled on a piece of paper . . .  If this man of mystery, this prophet without honor, had not lived when he did, the first World War might never have been fought . . . It has remained for a poet, Muriel Rukeyser, to put him into a biography which is also a study of the development of American culture since the beginning . . . Miss Rukeyser makes Gibbs . . . a symbol of American greatness, a figure to put beside architects of the American spirit as varied as Walt Whitman and Lincoln . . . This is a biography which all Americans should read.”
— John Chamberlain

“[Gibbs’s] work gives a key to the understanding of some central tendencies in the intellectual and social history of the past hundred years . . . [Rukeyser] is almost unique among our poets in her intellectual inquisitiveness. Her Willard Gibbs witnesses to that desire to see all round the objects of her interest which led her to go to aviation school before writing Theory of Flight, and to make both a documentary and a first-hand investigation of certain phases of the social scene before writing U. S. 1.”
— Philip Blair Rice