Oliver Heaviside

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Oliver Heaviside bigraphy, stories - Electrical engineer, mathematician and physicist

Oliver Heaviside : biography

18 May 1850 – 3 February 1925

Oliver Heaviside FRS ( 18 May 1850 – 3 February 1925) was a self-taught English electrical engineer, mathematician, and physicist who adapted complex numbers to the study of electrical circuits, invented mathematical techniques to the solution of differential equations (later found to be equivalent to Laplace transforms), reformulated Maxwell’s field equations in terms of electric and magnetic forces and energy flux, and independently co-formulated vector analysis. Although at odds with the scientific establishment for most of his life, Heaviside changed the face of mathematics and science for years to come.

Biography

Early years

Heaviside was born at 55 Kings Street (now Plender Street) in London’s Camden Town. He was short and red-headed, and suffered from scarlet fever when young, which left him with a hearing impairment. He was a good student (e.g. placed fifth out of five hundred students in 1865). Heaviside’s uncle Sir Charles Wheatstone (1802–1875) was the original co-inventor of the telegraph in the mid-1830s, and was an internationally celebrated expert in telegraphy and electromagnetism. Wheatstone was married to Heaviside’s aunt in London and took a strong interest in his nephew’s education.

Heaviside left school at age 16 to study at home in the subjects of telegraphy and electromagnetism. He continued full-time study at home until age 18. Then – in the only paid employment he ever had – he took a job as a telegraph operator with the Great Northern Telegraph Company working first in Denmark and then in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and was soon made a chief operator. It is likely that his uncle Sir Charles was instrumental in getting Heaviside the telegraph operator position. Heaviside continued to study while working, and at age 21 and 22 he published some research related to electric circuits and telegraphy. In 1874 at age 24 he resigned his job and returned to studying full-time on his own at his parents’ home in London. He remained single throughout his life.

In 1873 Heaviside had encountered James Clerk Maxwell’s newly published, and today famous, two-volume Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. In his old age Heaviside recalled:

Doing research from home, he helped develop transmission line theory (also known as the "telegrapher’s equations"). Heaviside showed mathematically that uniformly distributed inductance in a telegraph line would diminish both attenuation and distortion, and that, if the inductance were great enough and the insulation resistance not too high, the circuit would be distortionless while currents of all frequencies would have equal speeds of propagation. Heaviside’s equations helped further the implementation of the telegraph.

Middle years

In 1880, Heaviside researched the skin effect in telegraph transmission lines. That same year he patented, in England, the coaxial cable. In 1884 he recast Maxwell’s mathematical analysis from its original cumbersome form (they had already been recast as quaternions) to its modern vector terminology, thereby reducing twelve of the original twenty equations in twenty unknowns down to the four differential equations in two unknowns we now know as Maxwell’s equations. The four re-formulated Maxwell’s equations describe the nature of static and moving electric charges and magnetic dipoles, and the relationship between the two, namely electromagnetic induction.

Between 1880 and 1887, Heaviside developed the operational calculus (involving the D notation for the differential operator, which he is credited with creating), a method of solving differential equations by transforming them into ordinary algebraic equations which caused a great deal of controversy when first introduced, owing to the lack of rigour in his derivation of it. He famously said, "Mathematics is an experimental science, and definitions do not come first, but later on." He was replying to criticism over his use of operators that were not clearly defined. On another occasion he stated somewhat more defensively, "I do not refuse my dinner simply because I do not understand the process of digestion."