
Oliver Heaviside - z0a
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside
======
aymenim
A real smart and determined person, more like hackers today than, prestigious
academia of his time, he famously said " Am I to refuse to eat because I do
not fully understand the mechanism of digestion?" to the academics of his time
for giving him hard time for not having the mathematical background they had.

~~~
hazz
As I understood it, this was more in response to academics' frustration that
he did not properly define operators he went on to use in his derivations. I
can sympathise with this - mathematical proofs are difficult enough to follow
without having to guess the action of the operators involved.

~~~
ky3
_mathematical proofs are difficult enough to follow without having to guess
the action of the operators involved._

What Heaviside did was the sort of fast-and-loose syntactic manipulation that
makes mathematicians queasy and/or indignant [1]. He treats the derivative
operator just like it were an ordinary number X. And then he infers that 1/X
must mean integration.

Compare to the naive argument for the positive integers 1+2+3+... summing to
-1/12 that gets mathbabe's panties in a twist [2].

More details in Ch. 10 of Nahin's book.

[1] [http://myreckonings.com/wordpress/2007/12/07/heavisides-
oper...](http://myreckonings.com/wordpress/2007/12/07/heavisides-operator-
calculus/)

[2] [http://mathbabe.org/2014/01/21/if-its-hocus-pocus-then-
its-n...](http://mathbabe.org/2014/01/21/if-its-hocus-pocus-then-its-not-
math/)

------
beautifulfreak
There's a great chapter on Oliver Heaviside in Clifford Pickover's book,
Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives Of Eccentric Scientists And
Madmen, which portrays his struggles with the scientific establishment in some
detail. It includes an illustration by Heaviside of a modern looking recumbent
bicycle, an invention not usually attributed to him. How can someone with
Heaviside's vast influence be obscure, not at least as well known as Nikola
Tesla? Most engineers I've known have no idea that Maxwell's field equations
are not the same as the Maxwell's equations they know (and use).

~~~
ky3
Paul Nahin, emeritus of electrical engineering at U of New Hampshire, wrote a
richly technical and also riveting biography about Heaviside.

The book doesn't pull any punches with the math nor the physics because
equations are provided for the discerning reader whenever the discussion turns
technical, which is every other page. But also on every other page is a
picture of 19th century people and placesthat helps flesh out the dramatic
race for electrical power.

Worth mentioning is the whole chapter given to dramatizing Heaviside's arch-
nemesis, a Mr. William Henry Preece who's Chief Engineer at the British Post
Office. At the end of the chapter, Nahin repeats Preece's analysis of the
viability of residential electrical lighting, a problem then known as
'subdivision of light', and his conclusion that Edison is doomed to fail. The
error turns out to be taking the wrong limits.

I can't resist including this excerpt: "It is almost impossible to understand
why the 'subdivision of light' was so difficult to understand a mere century
ago. Perhaps a century hence somebody will write the same about our present
confusion over time-travel!"

~~~
keithpeter
" _In later years his behavior became quite eccentric. According to associate
B. A. Behrend, he became a recluse who was so averse to meeting people that he
delivered the manuscripts of his Electrician papers to a grocery store, where
the editors picked them up._ " \--quote from OA

Does Prof. Nahin's biography mention PC Brock?

[http://www.elayer.org.uk/page2.html](http://www.elayer.org.uk/page2.html)

~~~
ky3
Footnote 104: "Bobby" was Constable Henry Brock, who went well out of his way
to help Heaviside in his everyday activities, including the fetching of food.
His daughter would occasionally help straighten up Homefield. Oliver wrote
many letters to the Brock family, but none of them seems to have survived,
Brock died in 1947.

A good library should have the biography.

------
jacquesm
It may be a relatively unknown name for software people but he's one of the
gods for ham radio enthusiasts.

~~~
mijoharas
Very well known (and respected) by physicists too.

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Ono-Sendai
The Heaviside ellipsoid is quite fascinating - basically it explains
relativistic length contraction in terms of a foreshortened electric field in
the direction of motion of a moving charge. (
[http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Steady_Motion_of_an_Ele...](http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Steady_Motion_of_an_Electrified_Ellipsoid)
)

~~~
zackmorris
This is fascinating, I wish I could work through the math in greater detail. I
feel like old equations like this could reveal opportunities for linking
electromagnetism and gravitation (for example how acceleration is analogous to
gravity) without getting into so much of the quantum and multiple dimension
stuff that I feel is sometimes a distraction.

------
linksbro
Just went over the Heaviside step function at University before break. It's a
strong contender for the most kick-ass name in Maths academia.

~~~
JadeNB
> Just went over the Heaviside step function at University before break.

Like luos
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8798638](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8798638)),
I've always liked to pretend to my students that it is so named because there
is a heavy side and a light side. (Of course, I do tell them it's a joke!)

EDIT: Actually, I realise that I'm not sure _why_ it is so kick-ass. Is it the
idea of having a simple concept named after you? If so, then I have
respectfully to assert that nothing beats the Kronecker delta
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronecker_delta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronecker_delta)).
(Perhaps Abelian groups
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abelian_group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abelian_group))
come close.)

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aroman
I assume OP shared this after watching Bret Victor's recent talk, "The Humane
Representation of Thought"?

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ericssmith
The following two books are a fascinating look at Heaviside's contributions
and extraordinary life:

[http://www.amazon.com/Maxwellians-Cornell-History-
Science/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Maxwellians-Cornell-History-
Science/dp/0801482348/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1419607896&sr=8-1&keywords=the+maxwellians)

[http://www.amazon.com/Oliver-Heaviside-Electrical-Genius-
Vic...](http://www.amazon.com/Oliver-Heaviside-Electrical-Genius-
Victorian/dp/0801869099/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1419608003&sr=8-1&keywords=oliver+heaviside)

------
peter303
Faraday is a similar figure- experimentalist who invented fields, the electric
motor and the dynamo. But with little math skills it remained until Maxwell to
tie it all together in math.

~~~
evanb
Faraday's discoveries were quickly (or preemptively) "mathified" by Ampere,
Coulomb, Gauss, (and Heaviside!). Maxwell got the equations named after him
for "unifying" them, as it were, and on the basis of symmetry suggesting the
displacement current term (which then leads to the wave equation, showing
light is electromagnetic radiation).

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luos
After I learned signal processing at university I always thought that the
Heaviside step function was named like that because the step is "heavy" or
something in the signal.

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tjradcliffe
I distinctly remember that there's a comment by Arthur C Clarke somewhere to
the effect that Heaviside was the first person to write down E = m*c^2, which
is consistent with him having worked on "electromagnetic mass". This may also
be mentioned in David Bohm's book, which I have somewhere but not easily to
hand.

If anyone can confirm this it would be extremely interesting.

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arh68
Very inspirational! I did not know he was the one to reformulate Maxwell's
Eqs. I had a feeling an English person was behind _admittance, conductance,
impedance, inductance, permittance, reluctance & permeability_, but I suppose
his naming convention can be forgiven.

 _definitions do not come first, but later_ is a great quote, well-put.

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raverbashing
Interesting

Yeah, looks like his biography is a crash course in electrical engineering

I didn't know this by that name
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegrapher%27s_equations](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegrapher%27s_equations)
(just "transmission line equation" I guess the name is an anachronism)

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SamReidHughes
Whoa! I didn't know the guy looked like Flattop.

