5 ms·

Oliver Heaviside

100 points by z0a 12y ago

jacquesm 12y ago
It may be a relatively unknown name for software people but he's one of the gods for ham radio enthusiasts.
- mijoharas 12y ago
  Very well known (and respected) by physicists too.
SamReidHughes 12y ago
Whoa! I didn't know the guy looked like Flattop.
raverbashing 12y ago
Interesting Yeah, looks like his biography is a crash course in electrical engineering I didn't know this by that name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegrapher%27s_equations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegrapher%27s_equations (just "transmission line equation" I guess the name is an anachronism)
linksbro 12y ago
Just went over the Heaviside step function at University before break. It's a strong contender for the most kick-ass name in Maths academia.
- jib 12y ago
  Right up there with Picard's great theorem.
- JadeNB 12y ago
  > Just went over the Heaviside step function at University before break. Like luos (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8798638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8798638), I've always liked to pretend to my students that it is so named because there is a heavy side and a light side. (Of course, I do tell them it's a joke!) EDIT: Actually, I realise that I'm not sure why it is so kick-ass. Is it the idea of having a simple concept named after you? If so, then I have respectfully to assert that nothing beats the Kronecker delta (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronecker_delta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronecker_delta). (Perhaps Abelian groups (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abelian_group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abelian_group) come close.)
aymenim 12y ago
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.
- hazz 12y ago
  As I understood it, this was more in response to academics' frustration that he did not properly define operators he went on to use in his derivations. I can sympathise with this - mathematical proofs are difficult enough to follow without having to guess the action of the operators involved.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    That's why operator overloading is a bad idea, even if it gives you nice matrix operations in C++. The amount of times I came across abuse of this facility is much larger than the number of times where it actually made sense.
  - ky3 12y ago
    mathematical proofs are difficult enough to follow without having to guess the action of the operators involved. What Heaviside did was the sort of fast-and-loose syntactic manipulation that makes mathematicians queasy and/or indignant [1]. He treats the derivative operator just like it were an ordinary number X. And then he infers that 1/X must mean integration. Compare to the naive argument for the positive integers 1+2+3+... summing to -1/12 that gets mathbabe's panties in a twist [2]. More details in Ch. 10 of Nahin's book. [1] http://myreckonings.com/wordpress/2007/12/07/heavisides-operator-calculus/ http://myreckonings.com/wordpress/2007/12/07/heavisides-oper... [2] http://mathbabe.org/2014/01/21/if-its-hocus-pocus-then-its-not-math/ http://mathbabe.org/2014/01/21/if-its-hocus-pocus-then-its-n...
aroman 12y ago
I assume OP shared this after watching Bret Victor's recent talk, "The Humane Representation of Thought"?
luos 12y ago
After I learned signal processing at university I always thought that the Heaviside step function was named like that because the step is "heavy" or something in the signal.
arh68 12y ago
Very inspirational! I did not know he was the one to reformulate Maxwell's Eqs. I had a feeling an English person was behind admittance, conductance, impedance, inductance, permittance, reluctance & permeability, but I suppose his naming convention can be forgiven. definitions do not come first, but later is a great quote, well-put.
beautifulfreak 12y ago
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).
- ky3 12y ago
  Paul Nahin, emeritus of electrical engineering at U of New Hampshire, wrote a richly technical and also riveting biography about Heaviside. The book doesn't pull any punches with the math nor the physics because equations are provided for the discerning reader whenever the discussion turns technical, which is every other page. But also on every other page is a picture of 19th century people and placesthat helps flesh out the dramatic race for electrical power. Worth mentioning is the whole chapter given to dramatizing Heaviside's arch-nemesis, a Mr. William Henry Preece who's Chief Engineer at the British Post Office. At the end of the chapter, Nahin repeats Preece's analysis of the viability of residential electrical lighting, a problem then known as 'subdivision of light', and his conclusion that Edison is doomed to fail. The error turns out to be taking the wrong limits. I can't resist including this excerpt: "It is almost impossible to understand why the 'subdivision of light' was so difficult to understand a mere century ago. Perhaps a century hence somebody will write the same about our present confusion over time-travel!"
  - keithpeter 12y ago
    "In later years his behavior became quite eccentric. According to associate B. A. Behrend, he became a recluse who was so averse to meeting people that he delivered the manuscripts of his Electrician papers to a grocery store, where the editors picked them up." --quote from OA Does Prof. Nahin's biography mention PC Brock? http://www.elayer.org.uk/page2.html http://www.elayer.org.uk/page2.html
Ono-Sendai 12y ago
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. ( http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Steady_Motion_of_an_Electrified_Ellipsoid http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Steady_Motion_of_an_Ele... )
- zackmorris 12y ago
  This is fascinating, I wish I could work through the math in greater detail. I feel like old equations like this could reveal opportunities for linking electromagnetism and gravitation (for example how acceleration is analogous to gravity) without getting into so much of the quantum and multiple dimension stuff that I feel is sometimes a distraction.
peter303 12y ago
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.
- evanb 12y ago
  Faraday's discoveries were quickly (or preemptively) "mathified" by Ampere, Coulomb, Gauss, (and Heaviside!). Maxwell got the equations named after him for "unifying" them, as it were, and on the basis of symmetry suggesting the displacement current term (which then leads to the wave equation, showing light is electromagnetic radiation).
ericssmith 12y ago
The following two books are a fascinating look at Heaviside's contributions and extraordinary life: http://www.amazon.com/Maxwellians-Cornell-History-Science/dp/0801482348/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1419607896&sr=8-1&keywords=the+maxwellians http://www.amazon.com/Maxwellians-Cornell-History-Science/dp... http://www.amazon.com/Oliver-Heaviside-Electrical-Genius-Victorian/dp/0801869099/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1419608003&sr=8-1&keywords=oliver+heaviside http://www.amazon.com/Oliver-Heaviside-Electrical-Genius-Vic...
tjradcliffe 12y ago
I distinctly remember that there'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 "electromagnetic mass". This may also be mentioned in David Bohm's book, which I have somewhere but not easily to hand. If anyone can confirm this it would be extremely interesting.

Oliver Heaviside

100 points by z0a 12y ago

jacquesm 12y ago

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

mijoharas 12y ago
Very well known (and respected) by physicists too.

SamReidHughes 12y ago

Whoa! I didn't know the guy looked like Flattop.

raverbashing 12y ago

Interesting Yeah, looks like his biography is a crash course in electrical engineering I didn't know this by that name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegrapher%27s_equations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegrapher%27s_equations (just "transmission line equation" I guess the name is an anachronism)

linksbro 12y ago

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

jib 12y ago
Right up there with Picard's great theorem.
JadeNB 12y ago
> Just went over the Heaviside step function at University before break. Like luos (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8798638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8798638), I've always liked to pretend to my students that it is so named because there is a heavy side and a light side. (Of course, I do tell them it's a joke!) EDIT: Actually, I realise that I'm not sure why it is so kick-ass. Is it the idea of having a simple concept named after you? If so, then I have respectfully to assert that nothing beats the Kronecker delta (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronecker_delta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronecker_delta). (Perhaps Abelian groups (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abelian_group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abelian_group) come close.)

aymenim 12y ago

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.

hazz 12y ago
As I understood it, this was more in response to academics' frustration that he did not properly define operators he went on to use in his derivations. I can sympathise with this - mathematical proofs are difficult enough to follow without having to guess the action of the operators involved.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- jacquesm 12y ago
  That's why operator overloading is a bad idea, even if it gives you nice matrix operations in C++. The amount of times I came across abuse of this facility is much larger than the number of times where it actually made sense.
- ky3 12y ago
  mathematical proofs are difficult enough to follow without having to guess the action of the operators involved. What Heaviside did was the sort of fast-and-loose syntactic manipulation that makes mathematicians queasy and/or indignant [1]. He treats the derivative operator just like it were an ordinary number X. And then he infers that 1/X must mean integration. Compare to the naive argument for the positive integers 1+2+3+... summing to -1/12 that gets mathbabe's panties in a twist [2]. More details in Ch. 10 of Nahin's book. [1] http://myreckonings.com/wordpress/2007/12/07/heavisides-operator-calculus/ http://myreckonings.com/wordpress/2007/12/07/heavisides-oper... [2] http://mathbabe.org/2014/01/21/if-its-hocus-pocus-then-its-not-math/ http://mathbabe.org/2014/01/21/if-its-hocus-pocus-then-its-n...

aroman 12y ago

I assume OP shared this after watching Bret Victor's recent talk, "The Humane Representation of Thought"?

luos 12y ago

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

arh68 12y ago

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

beautifulfreak 12y ago

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).

ky3 12y ago
Paul Nahin, emeritus of electrical engineering at U of New Hampshire, wrote a richly technical and also riveting biography about Heaviside. The book doesn't pull any punches with the math nor the physics because equations are provided for the discerning reader whenever the discussion turns technical, which is every other page. But also on every other page is a picture of 19th century people and placesthat helps flesh out the dramatic race for electrical power. Worth mentioning is the whole chapter given to dramatizing Heaviside's arch-nemesis, a Mr. William Henry Preece who's Chief Engineer at the British Post Office. At the end of the chapter, Nahin repeats Preece's analysis of the viability of residential electrical lighting, a problem then known as 'subdivision of light', and his conclusion that Edison is doomed to fail. The error turns out to be taking the wrong limits. I can't resist including this excerpt: "It is almost impossible to understand why the 'subdivision of light' was so difficult to understand a mere century ago. Perhaps a century hence somebody will write the same about our present confusion over time-travel!"
- keithpeter 12y ago
  "In later years his behavior became quite eccentric. According to associate B. A. Behrend, he became a recluse who was so averse to meeting people that he delivered the manuscripts of his Electrician papers to a grocery store, where the editors picked them up." --quote from OA Does Prof. Nahin's biography mention PC Brock? http://www.elayer.org.uk/page2.html http://www.elayer.org.uk/page2.html

Ono-Sendai 12y ago

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. ( http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Steady_Motion_of_an_Electrified_Ellipsoid http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Steady_Motion_of_an_Ele... )

zackmorris 12y ago
This is fascinating, I wish I could work through the math in greater detail. I feel like old equations like this could reveal opportunities for linking electromagnetism and gravitation (for example how acceleration is analogous to gravity) without getting into so much of the quantum and multiple dimension stuff that I feel is sometimes a distraction.

peter303 12y ago

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.

evanb 12y ago
Faraday's discoveries were quickly (or preemptively) "mathified" by Ampere, Coulomb, Gauss, (and Heaviside!). Maxwell got the equations named after him for "unifying" them, as it were, and on the basis of symmetry suggesting the displacement current term (which then leads to the wave equation, showing light is electromagnetic radiation).

ericssmith 12y ago

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

tjradcliffe 12y ago

I distinctly remember that there'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 "electromagnetic mass". This may also be mentioned in David Bohm's book, which I have somewhere but not easily to hand. If anyone can confirm this it would be extremely interesting.