Gilbert Newton Lewis, 1875-1946

Gilbert Newton Lewis was born near Boston, Massachusetts, on 25 October 1875. At the age of nine he was taken by his parents to live in Lincoln, Nebraska.Here, for several years, he had little formal schooling, enjoying an advantage which he mentioned in his later years as having occurred frequently in the careers of the world’s most distinguished men, that of having ‘escaped some of the ordinary processes of formal education’. At the age of thirteen he was admitted to the preparatory school of the University of Nebraska. He graduated from this school into the University of Nebraska, where he remained to complete the sophomore year. In 1893 he transferred to Harvard College, and, after graduating in 1896, spent a year in teaching at Phillips Academy at Andover. He then returned to Harvard for graduate work and received the degree of Master of Arts in 1898 and Doctor of Philosophy in 1899. Hlis thesis was entitled, ‘Some electrochemical and thermochemical relations of zinc and cadmium amalgams’, and was published jointly with Theodore William Richards