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Commemoration

When the German physical chemist Walther Nernst visited Yale in 1906 to give the Silliman lecture, he was surprised to find no tangible memorial for Gibbs. Nernst donated his $500 lecture fee to the university to help pay for a suitable monument. This was finally unveiled in 1912, in the form of a bronze bas-relief by sculptor Lee Lawrie, installed in the Sloane Physics Laboratory. In 1910, the American Chemical Society established the Willard Gibbs Award for eminent work in pure or applied chemistry. In 1923, the American Mathematical Society endowed the Josiah Willard Gibbs Lectureship, "to show the public some idea of the aspects of mathematics and its applications".

In 1945, Yale University created the J. Willard Gibbs Professorship in Theoretical Chemistry, held until 1973 by Lars Onsager. Onsager, who much like Gibbs, focused on applying new mathematical ideas to problems in physical chemistry, won the 1968 Nobel Prize in chemistry. In addition to establishing the Josiah Willard Gibbs Laboratories and the J. Willard Gibbs Assistant Professorship in Mathematics, Yale has also hosted two symposia dedicated to Gibbs's life and work, one in 1989 and another on the centenary of his death, in 2003. Rutgers University endowed a J. Willard Gibbs Professorship of Thermomechanics, held as of 2014 by Bernard Coleman.

Gibbs was elected in 1950 to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. The oceanographic research ship USNS Josiah Willard Gibbs (T-AGOR-1) was in service with the United States Navy from 1958 to 1971. Gibbs crater, near the eastern limb of the Moon, was named in the scientist's honor in 1964.

Edward Guggenheim introduced the symbol G for the Gibbs free energy in 1933, and this was used also by Dirk ter Haar in 1966. This notation is now universal and is recommended by the IUPAC. In 1960, William Giauque and others suggested the name "gibbs" (abbreviated gbs.) for the unit of entropy calorie per kelvin, but this usage did not become common, and the corresponding SI unit joule per kelvin carries no special name.

In 1954, a year before his death, Albert Einstein was asked by an interviewer who were the greatest thinkers that he had known. Einstein replied: " Lorentz ", adding "I never met Willard Gibbs; perhaps, had I done so, I might have placed him beside Lorentz." Author Bill Bryson in his bestselling popular science book A Short History of Nearly Everything ranks Gibbs as "perhaps the most brilliant person that most people have never heard of".

In 1958, USS San Carlos was renamed USNS Josiah Willard Gibbs and re-designated as an oceanographic research ship.