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Oliver Heaviside (1850-1925)

Oliver Heaviside is someone whom you may not have heard about either. His name doesnt resonate in the education system as often as Newton, Archimedes, Lorentz, Euler, Poincare`, but it should. He was a remarkable individual and a huge contributor toward mathematics and physics. He dropped out of high-school at the tender age of sixteen to pursue an engineering position at a telegraph cable company and became enthralled with signal processing and electric measurement. With that, he published a paper in 1873 on a theorem of duplex telegraphy - which met great success with Maxwell and Thomson who were top electrical scientists at the time. His paper postulated that more than one signal can be transmitted through the same wire at the same time. By age 24, he resigned from the cable business and returned home to London to continue research on signal processing. Not too long after, he had completed his work which was an elaboration on eliminating electromagnetic interference in telegraph wires in a process called diffusion of voltage and current. He added that signals behaved as oscillatory wave lets. And if that wasnt innovative enough, the ultimate contribution came from his shortening of the original 20 Maxwell equations. You have heard there are only 4 of them. Yes, there are, but not until after Heaviside curtailed the use of quaternions Maxwell had used (Hamiltonians) into four simple differential equations using vector algebra. He also solved the problem in Maxwells paper of how energy transfer works in a circuit by a vector component and divergence theorem of energy curl. Unfortunately, John Poynting had submitted the same postulate shortly before him. Nevertheless, it was conceived before that the electromagnetic fields were generated by moving charges, but they found current is what generates them. This is where the right-hand rule comes in which was developed later on by British physicist current generates the field perpendicular to it. Later in his year, after the invention of the telephone, Oliver and his brother discovered how parallel circuits with the use of inductors diffuse interference and improve signal in telephones. This was later coined inductive loading. There was a political fiasco that resulted in this paper, but I will leave that to the reader. In further contributions to mathematics, Laplace transforms, a hypothetical s-space is transformed into a real space. Oliver invented the step function in Laplace transforms which describes the activity of current in electrical circuits with respect to time. He did this by incorporating the Dirac delta function which means the function asymptotically converges to zero everywhere.

You can see here in the image below where there is a big jump in current at 0. This is called a piecewise function (Heaviside step function) and the second is a continuous function. Piecewise functions are discontinuous as it appears.

Image: Wolframalpha.com

One thing sadly left out in the resource for my paper is that he had also invented the cover-up method of solving unknowns in partial fractions (a huge headache-saver for me personally in differential equations). Oliver Heaviside died in 1925 a rather grumpy and isolated old chap. Although can you blame him? He was never truly recognized as brilliant in abilities, intelligence and contribution as the well-known mathematicians and physicists of his time. In fact, a lot of times his work was unnecessarily shafted in academic journals. It makes me smile a bit whenever I hear a professor who mentions his name. Its as if to say this is the guy you should be idolizing because he made many things a hell of a lot easier for us physicists and mathematicians.

That of a Shakespeare or a Newton is stupendous. Such men live the best parts of their lives after they shuffle off the mortal coil and fall into the grave. Maxwell was one of those men. His soul will live and grow for long to come, and, thousands of years hence, it will shine as one of the bright stars of the past, whose light takes ages to reach us, amongst the crowd of others, not the least bright. Oliver Heaviside

Citations: 1. Phys. Today 65(11), 48 (2012); doi: 10.1063/PT.3.1788 2. O. Heaviside, notebook 8, Heaviside Collection, Institution of Engineering and Technology Archive, London, quoted in ref. 2, p. 4. 3. Weisstein, Eric W. "Heaviside Step Function." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/HeavisideStepFunction.html

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