The story
Named after Josiah Willard Gibbs, who introduced it in 1902.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Gibbs algorithm
Today it means: A criterion for choosing a probability distribution for the statistical ensemble of microstates of a thermodynamic system by minimizing the average log probability ⟨ ln p_i⟩=∑ᵢp_i ln p_i,, subject to the probability distribution pᵢ satisfying a set of constraints (usually expectation values) corresponding to the known macroscopic quantities. Full definition →