Lewis was born in West Newton, Massachusetts, on October 25, 1875. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Nebraska and received his Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard University in 1899. Like most American Ph.D.s of the time, he then traveled to Europe for post-doctoral research. He chose Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald, at Leipzig, Germany, and Hermann Walther Nernst, at Göttingen, Germany, as his mentors. After a year as a chemist at the Bureau of Weights and Measures in Manila, Phillipines, Lewis became professor of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1912 he accepted an appointment as chairman of the Department of Chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley, where he remained until his death on March 23, 1946. Lewis's contributions to chemical science fall primarily into three categories: thermodynamics, bonding, and acid-base chemistry. Some of his earliest research involved the determination of free energy (a...