[HN Gopher] Oliver Heaviside (1850-1925) - Physical Mathematicia... ___________________________________________________________________ Oliver Heaviside (1850-1925) - Physical Mathematician (1983) Author : agnosticmantis Score : 91 points Date : 2021-04-09 14:48 UTC (8 hours ago) (HTM) web link (sci-hub.se) (TXT) w3m dump (sci-hub.se) | OnlyOneCannolo wrote: | I love how the Heaviside function looks the way it sounds. | | ____---- | jhallenworld wrote: | Also: | | "Coaxial cable was used in the first (1858) and following | transatlantic cable installations, but its theory wasn't | described until 1880 by English physicist, engineer, and | mathematician Oliver Heaviside, who patented the design in that | year (British patent No. 1,407)." | | https://lemmatalogic.com/HeavisideUKPatent1407.pdf | Stratoscope wrote: | Anyone who has seen the musical _Cats_ has heard Heaviside 's | name. The Jellicle Cats sing of ascending "up up up to the | Heaviside Layer." | | https://catsmusical.fandom.com/wiki/Heaviside_Layer | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennelly%E2%80%93Heaviside_lay... | devindotcom wrote: | I read lately that the Heaviside layer (Kennelly-Heaviside | properly) of the atmosphere, composed of ionized gases, was used | for years to bounce radio transmissions off of, allowing them to | "skip" multiple times occasionally and travel thousands of miles. | It was seasonal and unpredictable on a short term basis so using | it seems to have been about equal parts luck, skill, and art. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennelly%E2%80%93Heaviside_lay... | afturkrull wrote: | > I read lately that the Heaviside layer .. was seasonal and | unpredictable on a short term basis so using it seems to have | been about equal parts luck, skill, and art. | | It was a lot more useful than that. Before the advent of | satellites, shortwave radio was used extensively to commuicate | with her Majesties far-flung colonies. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_World_Service | Stratoscope wrote: | Shortwave radio was great in its day. I used to spend many | hours a day listening to international shortwave broadcasts, | and talking with other amateur radio operators. | | One day about 20 years ago I was driving through San Jose and | happened to tune in to North Korea radio on the shortwave | receiver I had installed in my car, and heard this news gem: | | "Scientists are studying the brain of Respected Comrade Kim | Jong-Il, because the Respected Comrade is capable of feats of | mental power beyond the ability of ordinary human beings." | | Even today, shortwave is making a bit of a comeback thanks to | High Frequency Trading: | | https://hackaday.com/2018/05/12/hft-on-hf-you-cant-beat-it-f... | | https://swling.com/blog/2018/05/mystery-traders-using-shortw... | bjornsing wrote: | "Safari cannot open the page because the server could not be | found." | | Is this somehow blocked in Sweden? I'm on a Telia FTTH line in | Malmo. | gwern wrote: | Mirror: https://www.gwern.net/docs/science/1983-edge.pdf | alfla wrote: | hmm, could be dns blocking by your ISP. Try changing your DNS | server to 8.8.8.8 (Google) | mhh__ wrote: | He's buried near where I live, I've been meaning to go on a | pilgrimage | rrss wrote: | I will always upvote Heaviside. This man is responsible for most | of the foundation of electrical engineering as it exists today | (via and refined by others, especially those at Bell Labs who | recognized the importance of his work). Unfortunately, in my | experience, most electrical engineers only know his name as a | reference to the step function. | [deleted] | zwieback wrote: | MEs as well, step function for beam bending. I vaguely remember | his name coming up in controls as well where Laplace is | popular. | jhallenworld wrote: | Heaviside (partial fraction) expansion I think: | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaviside_cover-up_method | mhh__ wrote: | The Heaviside step function probably | analog31 wrote: | I think it's great that the function named after him has a | heavy side. | isitdopamine wrote: | I'll leave this here: | | https://me.me/i/barber-what-do-you-want-heaviside-you- | heard-... | ISO-morphism wrote: | > step function | | As mentioned in the article he wasn't well accepted by | academics of the time. A college math professor of mine | remarked that the acceptance of naming the step function after | him was intentionally demeaning to the rest of his work. | hilbert42 wrote: | Yeah, right. ;-) But ultimately those who demeaned Heaviside | weren't that successful given that most of his electrical | nomenclature has actually stood the test of time and is still | used today. It's worth quoting Wiki's list | (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside): | | _" Electromagnetic terms | | Heaviside coined the following terms of art in | electromagnetic theory: | | * admittance (reciprocal of impedance) (December 1887); | | * elastance (reciprocal of permittance, reciprocal of | capacitance) (1886); | | * conductance (real part of admittance, reciprocal of | resistance) (September 1885); | | * electret for the electric analogue of a permanent magnet, | or, in other words, any substance that exhibits a quasi- | permanent electric polarization (e.g. ferroelectric); | | * impedance (July 1886); | | * inductance (February 1886); | | * permeability (September 1885); | | * permittance (now called capacitance) and permittivity (June | 1887); | | * reluctance (May 1888)."_ | | Methinks that's more than anyone else has done! | madengr wrote: | Interesting. I've been doing RF engineering for 25 years | and have never read of permittence and elastance. We | usually call it inductive and capacitive susceptance. But | yeah, Heaviside did a ton of stuff; I read that | aforementioned biography. | tigerlily wrote: | So what did the college professor think of the Dirac delta | function? | afturkrull wrote: | There's also the "Heaviside Layer" responsible for shortwave | radio communication. Heaviside did go a little eccentric in his | later years and moved granite furniture into his house. | ndsipa_pomu wrote: | Dagnammit - sci-hub.se is blocked by VirginMedia in the UK | mhh__ wrote: | What vital work they do | CliffStoll wrote: | Wonderful note about a most important mathematical physicist. | | Unmentioned is his stumble in relativity theory: As Paul Nahin | wrote, | | Despite the 'Einsteinian look' of Heaviside's speed-dependent | terms, his analysis was greatly lacking when compared with | Einstein's. Heaviside started with moving charged matter and then | applied some heavy mathematics to Maxwell's electrodynamics, | while Einstein used nothing but the fundamental ideas of space | and time, some simple algebra, and the two relativity principles | (all physical laws look the same in all inertial frames, and | observers in different inertial frames will measure the same | value for the speed of light). Einstein's analysis is free of any | special assumptions concerning electricity in particular and the | nature of matter in general: to put it bluntly, Einstein saw the | whole forest, while Heaviside and Thomson were looking through a | magnifying glass at the bark on a single tree. | | https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2017.044... | bsder wrote: | > Einstein saw the whole forest, while Heaviside and Thomson | were looking through a magnifying glass at the bark on a single | tree. | | That's an incorrect characterization. | | Heaviside is pre-Michelson-Morley. Einstein is post. | | The fact that "Ether doesn't exist. Electromagnetic waves | simply transmit without a medium." is a _VERY VERY VERY_ big | change in the fundamentals of physics. | | That opened the door for the _hypothesis_ that "all physical | laws look the same in all inertial frames" because without | "Ether" you cannot anoint a _preferred_ inertial frame. The | Michelson-Morley experiment was the first test of that | hypothesis. | | And, to be fair, the kind of fields interpretation that | Einstein championed has weaknesses: | | 1) It's an absolute bear to compute--the Heaviside-Hertz | formulations lend themselves to engineering much better pre- | computers. | | 2) It had severe experimental holes--at the time. | | For example, the Einstein fields interpretation makes the | prediction that an an excited electron in an atom will never | decay. That, of course, was nonsense--excited atoms always | decay to ground state. Except--now that we can isolate single | atoms we absolutely see that single atoms _don 't_ decay--only | the ensemble interactions cause them to decay. | hilbert42 wrote: | Oliver Heaviside is very often underrated and forgotten and he | deserves not to be--even his reformulation of Maxwell's | equations into the four that we know and commonly use today | alone ought to have him receive better history/recognition in | the textbooks. This is probably because he was an outsider to | the physics and electrical engineering establishment and he | wasn't known to make friends easily, and he didn't abide fools | well. | | Whilst CliffStoll's quote (and link) is from Paul J. Nahin's | article in the Royal Society journal it's also worth | highlighting the fact that Nahin has written a full bio on | Heaviside (it's mentioned in the article's footnotes but might | be overlooked). I have a copy of the book, it is excellent, | it's likely the most comprehensive and authoritative written on | Heaviside, and I'd thoroughly recommend it: _Oliver Heaviside- | The Life, Work, & Times of an Electrical Genius of the | Victorian Age; Paul J. Nahin PJ (c)1988-IEEE (c)2002-John | Hopkins Uni, ISBN 0-8018-6909-9 paperback ed._ | | It's all very well to praise Heaviside but if one really wants | to get a feel for the extent and depth of his work then I refer | one to the following works of his that are on the Internet | Archive (they're out of copyright so they can be downloaded). | Note, as with many works, the Internet Archive has multiple | copies some of which are more readable (or better scanned) than | others, so the seemingly multiple entries are not duplicates. | Two other points to note, this list is not comprehensive and | the IA's file-naming conventions are sometimes skewed or | confusing (apologies if I've made any typos): | | Electromagnetic Theory, Volume-1, Heaviside, Oliver, 1850-1925, | 1893 edition: | https://archive.org/details/electromagnetic00heavgoog | | Electromagnetic Theory, Volume-1, Heaviside, Oliver, 1850-1925, | 1894/1912 ed.: | https://archive.org/details/electromagnetict01heavrich | | Electromagnetic Theory, Volume-2, Heaviside, Oliver, 1850-1925, | 1894/1912 ed.: | https://archive.org/details/electromagnetict02heavrich | | Electromagnetic Theory, Volume-3, Heaviside, Oliver, 1850-1925, | 1893 ed.: | https://archive.org/details/electromagnetict03heavuoft | | Electrical Papers, Volume-1, Heaviside, Oliver, 1850-1925, 1892 | ed.: https://archive.org/details/electricalpapers01heavuoft | | Electrical Papers, Volume-2, Heaviside, Oliver, 1850-1925, 1894 | ed.: https://archive.org/details/electricalpaper01heavgoog | | Electrical Papers, Volume-2, Heaviside, Oliver, 1850-1925, 1894 | ed.: https://archive.org/details/electricalpapers02heavrich | | Electromagnetic Waves, Heaviside, Oliver, 1850-1925, 1889 ed.: | https://archive.org/details/electromagnetic01heavgoog | sprash wrote: | Interestingly the 4 "Maxwell" Equations as we know them today in | its algebraic form are actually developed by Heaviside. The | original 12 Maxwell equations containing ugly complex calculus | expressions are far less elegant and unintuitive. | UncleSlacky wrote: | In doing so he left out some interesting physics, though. | amelius wrote: | Could you please provide a link? | vecter wrote: | Can you explain? | dboreham wrote: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity ? | selimthegrim wrote: | Could also be this - | https://www.ams.org/notices/201410/rnoti-p1186.pdf | billfruit wrote: | Also did have a role in popularizing the the usage of vectors | or was it someone else? ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-04-09 23:00 UTC)