Heaviside

Oliver Heaviside

Born: 18 May 1850 in Camden Town, London, England
Died: 3 Feb 1925 in Paignton, Devon, England

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In 1870 Oliver Heaviside became a telegrapher but had to give up 4 years later as he became deaf. Heaviside worked on electromagnetism and introduced important results in vector analysis. His operational calculus, developed between 1880 and 1887, caused some controversy.

Burnside rejected one of his papers on the grounds that it contained errors of substance and had irredeemable inadequacies in proof. However Whittaker rated Heaviside's operational calculus as one of the three most important discoveries of the late 19th Century.

In 1902 Heaviside predicted that there was an conducting layer in the atmosphere which allowed radio waves to follow the Earth's curvature. This layer in the atmosphere, the Heaviside layer, is named after him.

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. Obituary of Oliver Heaviside, Proc. Roy. Soc. London 110A (1926), 14.
  4. E T Whittaker, Oliver Heaviside, Bull. Calcutta Math. Soc. 20 (1928-29), 216-220.
  5. S S Petrova, Heaviside and the Development of the Symbolic Calculus, Archive for History of Exact Sciences 37 (1987), 1-23.
  6. J Z Buchwald, Oliver Heaviside, Maxwell's apostle and Maxwellian apostate, Centaurus 28 (1985), 288-330.
  7. P J Nahin, Oliver Heaviside : Sage in solitude : the life, work, and times of an electrical genius of the Victorian age (New York, 1988).
  8. P J Nahin, Oliver Heaviside, Scientific American 262 (1990), 80-87.
  9. H J Josephs, Oliver Heaviside : a biography (London, 1963).
  10. G Lee, Oliver Heaviside (London, 1947).
  11. W A Atherton, Oliver Heaviside (1850-1925) : champion of inductance, Electronics and wireless world 93 (1987), 789-790.
  12. G F C Searle, Oliver Heaviside, the man (St. Albans, 1987).
  13. A C Lynch, The sources for a biography of Oliver Heaviside, History of technology 13 (1991), 145-149. 
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JOC/EFR February 1996