John "Jack" Gamble Kirkwood (May 30, 1907,
Gotebo, Oklahoma – August 9, 1959,
New Haven, Connecticut
New Haven is a city in the U.S. state of Connecticut. It is located on New Haven Harbor on the northern shore of Long Island Sound in New Haven County, Connecticut and is part of the New York City metropolitan area. With a population of 134 ...
) was a noted
chemist
A chemist (from Greek ''chēm(ía)'' alchemy; replacing ''chymist'' from Medieval Latin ''alchemist'') is a scientist trained in the study of chemistry. Chemists study the composition of matter and its properties. Chemists carefully describe th ...
and
physicist
A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe.
Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...
, holding
faculty
Faculty may refer to:
* Faculty (academic staff), the academic staff of a university (North American usage)
* Faculty (division)
A faculty is a division within a university or college comprising one subject area or a group of related subject ...
positions at
Cornell University
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...
, the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...
,
California Institute of Technology
The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...
, and
Yale University
Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the w ...
.
Early life and background
Kirkwood was born in
Gotebo, Oklahoma, the oldest child of John Millard and Lillian Gamble Kirkwood. His father was educated as an
attorney and was a distributor for the
Goodyear Corporation in the state of Kansas. In addition to Jack Kirkwood, there were two younger sisters: Caroline (1910) and Margaret (1921).
In 1909, the family moved to
Wichita, Kansas
Wichita ( ) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Kansas and the county seat of Sedgwick County. As of the 2020 census, the population of the city was 397,532. The Wichita metro area had a population of 647,610 in 2020. It is located in ...
. In the 1920s the family traveled to Pasadena, California to escape Midwestern winters.
Education
While in Pasadena, Kirkwood, age 15, audited chemistry classes at Caltech. Showing remarkable talent in mathematics and chemistry, Kirkwood was persuaded by
A. A. Noyes to enroll at
Caltech
The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...
before finishing his high school education. He attended Caltech for two years before transferring to the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...
, where he was awarded his
Bachelor of Science
A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years.
The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University o ...
in 1926.
Academic career
Kirkwood received an B.S. in Physics from the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...
in 1926, and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
in 1929, where he worked with
Frederick G. Keyes
Frederick George Keyes (June 24, 1885 – April 14, 1976) was an American physical chemist.
Keyes was most notable for inventing a method to sterilize milk using ultraviolet rays, and discovering that ultraviolet rays kill germs. According to the ...
. He spent two years in Europe, where he worked with
Peter Debye
Peter Joseph William Debye (; ; March 24, 1884 – November 2, 1966) was a Dutch-American physicist and physical chemist, and Nobel laureate in Chemistry.
Biography
Early life
Born Petrus Josephus Wilhelmus Debije in Maastricht, Netherland ...
and visited
Arnold Sommerfeld
Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld, (; 5 December 1868 – 26 April 1951) was a German theoretical physicist who pioneered developments in atomic and quantum physics, and also educated and mentored many students for the new era of theoretic ...
.
He returned to MIT for the period 1932-1934 as a Research Associate in Physical Chemistry. There, with Frederick G. Keyes, he mentored
Herbert H. Uhlig, who subsequently became a noted physical chemist, specializing in the study of corrosion. Kirkwood won the 1936
Langmuir Award in recognition of his status as the best young chemist in the United States. In the same year he was awarded the
American Chemical Society Award in Pure Chemistry.
In 1935, Kirkwood became the Todd Professor of Chemistry at Cornell. During World War II, J. Robert Openheimer recruited Kirkwood to work as one of the scientists participating in the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. Kirkwood witnessed the detonation of the first Hydrogen bomb at the Bikini atoll in 1951. Following the war, in 1946, Linius Pauling proposed to Robert Millikan, the then President of Caltech, that they recruit Kirkwood to come to Caltech by offering him a newly created professorship named for Author A. Noyes who, years earlier, had recruited Kirkwood to attend Caltech as an undergraduate. Kirkwood accepted the offer and was the Noyes Professor of Chemistry from 1947 until he accepted an offer from Yale in 1952 to be the Sterling Professor at Yale and head its chemistry department. He headed the chemistry department at Yale until his death from colon cancer in 1959, at age 52.
Every other year, the Department of Chemistry at Yale, together with the New Haven Chemical Society, awards the Kirkwood Medal. It is noteworthy that nearly half of the recipients of the Kirkwood Medal have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Kirkwood has two chairs in chemistry in his name. Yale has a John G. Kirkwood professorship in Chemistry. Caltech has a Kirkwood-Noyes professorship.
In his classic 1939 paper “The Dielectric Polarization of Polar Liquids,” Kirkwood introduced for the first time the concept of orientational correlations for neighboring molecules and showed how these control the dielectric behavior of liquids.
The year 1946 was especially notable for the appearance of the first paper in a long series that Kirkwood and his collaborators devoted to the fundamental statistical mechanical theory of transport processes.
Kirkwood was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1942.
See also
*
Kirkwood approximation
*
Kirkwood–Buff solution theory
*
BBGKY hierarchy
In statistical physics, the BBGKY hierarchy (Bogoliubov–Born–Green–Kirkwood–Yvon hierarchy, sometimes called Bogoliubov hierarchy) is a set of equations describing the dynamics of a system of a large number of interacting particles. The equ ...
*
Hydrodynamic radius
The hydrodynamic radius of a macromolecule or colloid particle is R_. The macromolecule or colloid particle is a collection of N subparticles. This is done most commonly for polymers; the subparticles would then be the units of the polymer. R_ ...
Notes
References
*
External links
National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kirkwood, John Gamble
1907 births
1959 deaths
People from Kiowa County, Oklahoma
California Institute of Technology alumni
University of Chicago alumni
American physical chemists
Cornell University faculty
University of Chicago faculty
California Institute of Technology faculty
Yale University faculty
Yale Sterling Professors
Burials at Grove Street Cemetery
Fellows of the American Physical Society