Oliver Heaviside

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.

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).

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

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. ( <a href="http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Steady_Motion_of_an_Electrified_Ellipsoid" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikisource.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;On_the_Steady_Motion_of_an_Ele...</a> )

Just went over the Heaviside step function at University before break. It&#x27;s a strong contender for the most kick-ass name in Maths academia.

I assume OP shared this after watching Bret Victor&#x27;s recent talk, &quot;The Humane Representation of Thought&quot;?

The following two books are a fascinating look at Heaviside&#x27;s contributions and extraordinary life:<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Maxwellians-Cornell-History-Science/dp/0801482348/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1419607896&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=the+maxwellians" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Maxwellians-Cornell-History-Science&#x2F;dp...</a><p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Oliver-Heaviside-Electrical-Genius-Victorian/dp/0801869099/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1419608003&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=oliver+heaviside" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Oliver-Heaviside-Electrical-Genius-Vic...</a>

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.

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

I distinctly remember that there&#x27;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 &quot;electromagnetic mass&quot;. This may also be mentioned in David Bohm&#x27;s book, which I have somewhere but not easily to hand.<p>If anyone can confirm this it would be extremely interesting.

Very inspirational! I did not know he was the one to reformulate Maxwell&#x27;s Eqs. I had a feeling an English person was behind <i>admittance, conductance, impedance, inductance, permittance, reluctance &amp; permeability</i>, but I suppose his naming convention can be forgiven.<p><i>definitions do not come first, but later</i> is a great quote, well-put.

Interesting<p>Yeah, looks like his biography is a crash course in electrical engineering<p>I didn&#x27;t know this by that name <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegrapher%27s_equations" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Telegrapher%27s_equations</a> (just &quot;transmission line equation&quot; I guess the name is an anachronism)

Whoa! I didn&#x27;t know the guy looked like Flattop.