36 Facts About Oliver Heaviside

Oliver Heaviside FRS was an English self-taught mathematician and physicist who invented a new technique for solving differential equations, independently developed vector calculus, and rewrote Maxwell's equations in the form commonly used today.

Oliver Heaviside significantly shaped the way Maxwell's equations are understood and applied in the decades following Maxwell's death.

Oliver Heaviside was born in Camden Town, London, at 55 Kings Street, the youngest of three children of Thomas, a draughtsman and wood engraver, and Rachel Elizabeth.

Oliver Heaviside was a short and red-headed child, and suffered from scarlet fever when young, which left him with a hearing impairment.

Oliver Heaviside was a good student, placing fifth out of five hundred students in 1865, but his parents could not keep him at school after he was 16, so he continued studying for a year by himself and had no further formal education.

Oliver Heaviside continued to study while working, and by the age of 22 he published an article in the prestigious Philosophical Magazine on 'The Best Arrangement of Wheatstone's Bridge for measuring a Given Resistance with a Given Galvanometer and Battery' which received positive comments from physicists who had unsuccessfully tried to solve this algebraic problem, including Sir William Thomson, to whom he gave a copy of the paper, and James Clerk Maxwell.

In 1873 Oliver Heaviside had encountered Maxwell's newly published, and later famous, two-volume Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism.

Oliver 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 in that currents of all frequencies would have equal speeds of propagation.

In 1880, Oliver Heaviside researched the skin effect in telegraph transmission lines.

In 1887, Oliver Heaviside worked with his brother Arthur on a paper entitled "The Bridge System of Telephony".

Oliver Heaviside was convinced that Preece was behind the sacking of the editor of The Electrician which brought his long-running series of articles to a halt.

The importance of Oliver Heaviside's work remained undiscovered for some time after publication in The Electrician.

However, Oliver Heaviside refused the offer, declining to accept any money unless the company were to give him full recognition.

Oliver Heaviside was chronically poor, making his refusal of the offer even more striking.

In 1889, Oliver Heaviside first published a correct derivation of the magnetic force on a moving charged particle, which is the magnetic component of what is called the Lorentz force.

Oliver Heaviside treated this as material mass, capable of producing the same effects.

In 1905 Oliver Heaviside was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Gottingen.

Oliver Heaviside's proposal included means by which radio signals are transmitted around the Earth's curvature.

The predictions by Oliver Heaviside, combined with Planck's radiation theory, probably discouraged further attempts to detect radio waves from the Sun and other astronomical objects.

Oliver Heaviside was an opponent of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.

Mathematician Howard Eves has commented that Oliver Heaviside "was the only first-rate physicist at the time to impugn Einstein, and his invectives against relativity theory often bordered on the absurd".

Oliver Heaviside reportedly started painting his fingernails pink and had granite blocks moved into his house for furniture.

On Oliver Heaviside's religious views, he was a Unitarian, but not religious.

Oliver Heaviside was even said to have made fun of people who put their faith in a supreme being.

Oliver Heaviside is buried with his father, Thomas Heaviside, and his mother, Rachel Elizabeth Heaviside.

Oliver Heaviside was always held in high regard by most electrical engineers, particularly after his correction to Kelvin's transmission line analysis was vindicated, but most of his wider recognition was gained posthumously.

Oliver Heaviside did much to develop and advocate vector methods and vector calculus.

Oliver Heaviside employed the curl and divergence operators of the vector calculus to reformulate 12 of these 20 equations into four equations in four variables, the form by which they have been known ever since.

The possibility of gravitational waves was discussed by Oliver Heaviside using the analogy between the inverse-square law in gravitation and electricity.

Oliver Heaviside invented the Heaviside step function, using it to calculate the current when an electric circuit is switched on.

Oliver Heaviside was the first to use the unit impulse function now usually known as the Dirac delta function.

Oliver Heaviside invented his operational calculus method for solving linear differential equations.

Oliver Heaviside was familiar with the Laplace transform method but considered his own method more direct.

Oliver Heaviside developed the transmission line theory, which had the effect of increasing the transmission rate over transatlantic cables by a factor of ten.

Oliver Heaviside coined the following terms of art in electromagnetic theory:.

Oliver Heaviside is sometimes incorrectly credited with coining susceptance and reactance.