History
It is likely that the term “functions of state” was used in a loose sense during the 1850s and 60s by those such as Rudolf Clausius, William Rankine, Peter Tait, William Thomson, and it is clear that by the 1870s the term had acquired a use of its own. In 1873, for example, Willard Gibbs, in his paper “Graphical Methods in the Thermodynamics of Fluids”, states: “The quantities V, B, T, U, and S are determined when the state of the body is given, and it may be permitted to call them functions of the state of the body.”
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