

Oliver Heaviside Wrote Maxwell’s Equations (2013) - xiler
http://theinstitute.ieee.org/technology-focus/technology-history/did-you-know-someone-else-wrote-maxwells-equations

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jhallenworld
Heaviside was on the mathematician's side of this old debate:
[http://faculty.poly.edu/~jbain/histlight/readings/83Hunt.pdf](http://faculty.poly.edu/~jbain/histlight/readings/83Hunt.pdf)

He perfected operational calculus for electrical engineering:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_calculus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_calculus)

    
    
       Norbert Wiener in 1926:
    
        "The brilliant work of Heaviside is purely heuristic,
        devoid of even the pretense to mathematical rigor. Its
        operators apply to electric voltages and currents,
        which may be discontinuous and certainly need not be
        analytic. For example, the favorite corpus vile on
        which he tries out his operators is a function which 
        vanishes to the left of the origin and is 1 to the 
        right. This excludes any direct application of the 
        methods of Pincherle…
        Although Heaviside’s developments have not been 
        justified by the present state of the purely 
        mathematical theory of operators, there is a great deal 
        of what we may call experimental evidence of their 
        validity, and they are very valuable to the electrical 
        engineers. There are cases, however, where they lead to 
        ambiguous or contradictory results..."

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madengr
What about Gibbs?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_Gibbs](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_Gibbs)

I thought del operator was his?

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LoSboccacc
and what about Gauss? the whole field was working or knew about the problem
and each other knew the other researches, we just slapped the Maxwell name for
recognition as he explained how the stuff worked (pretty much as Einstein
equations weren't is own), and in the centuries became 'ownage' \- it's
interesting however to see how 'legends' form

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jreimers
For those interested in the history and mathematical development of Maxwell's
Equations as we know them today, Paul J. Nahin's book on Heaviside[1] is a
must read.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Oliver-Heaviside-Electrical-Genius-
Vic...](http://www.amazon.com/Oliver-Heaviside-Electrical-Genius-
Victorian/dp/0801869099)

~~~
madengr
Ditto. Good book.

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im3w1l
Heaviside's name hasn't faded entirely. The step function is named after him.

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rndn
Why don't other basic functions (constant, reciprocal, parabola …) actually
have a name as well? I.e. why did Heaviside’s name stick with the step
function?

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chestervonwinch
He apparently invented it [1], or at least popularized it via Laplace
transforms for solving differential equations.

[1]: [http://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/1984/why-is-the-
heavi...](http://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/1984/why-is-the-heaviside-
step-function-named-after-heaviside)

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xiler
He also managed to recognize a relationship between electromagnetism and
gravity before Einstein.

[http://serg.fedosin.ru/Heavisid.htm](http://serg.fedosin.ru/Heavisid.htm)

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madengr
He invented coax too.

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agumonkey
side note: they have a page on another not-famous-enough pioneer

[http://theinstitute.ieee.org/technology-focus/technology-
his...](http://theinstitute.ieee.org/technology-focus/technology-
history/first-ieee-milestones-in-india)

