Shrine

Bob Handelman

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Noah Webster, Walter Camp, Eli Whitney—New Haven’s Grove Street Cemetery is home to the remains of more than its share of notable people. But cemetery superintendent Jacob Jennings says the person about whom they get the most inquiries is Josiah Willard Gibbs Jr. (Class of 1858, 1863PhD), the Yale professor and thermodynamics pioneer that Albert Einstein called “the greatest mind in American history.” The top of Gibbs’s raised monument attracts a wide array of tributes from visitors: coins and paper money from many nations, stones, and quite a few pens. 

Ramamurti Shankar, the J. W. Gibbs Professor of Physics at Yale, often takes visitors to the monument. “Gibbs has been a hero of mine for many years, even before I came to Yale,” Shankar says. He hasn’t seen people leaving objects for Gibbs, but Jennings has an idea where some of them come from. “I have heard from some students that they leave an offering for good luck on their final exams,” he says. Apparently even budding scientists are prone to magical thinking when finals roll around.