Oliver Heaviside

Oliver Heaviside ( born May 18, 1850 in London, † February 3, 1925 in Home Field at Torquay ) was a British mathematician and physicist, the major contributions to the development of electromagnetism delivered.

Life

Heaviside grew up in London. His father introduced woodcuts and watercolors ago. In early youth Heaviside ill with scarlet fever, and the nachgebliebene deafness made ​​the diminutive, red-haired Heaviside for his classmates to outsiders. Despite good school performance, he left to be with 16 years of school at a telegrapher, where his uncle Charles Wheatstone supported him ( a physicist and one of the inventors of telegraphy ). Heaviside learned German and Danish and studied since 1868 in Denmark ( in Fredericia ) the profession of the telegraph. In 1870 he was back in England, where he quickly brought it in Newcastle as the Chief telegrapher the Great Northern Telegraphe Company. In 1872, he published essays also on Electricity, which even elicited the attention of James Clerk Maxwell, who mentioned it in the second edition of his main work Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism.

Heaviside was fascinated by Maxwell's work. In 1874 he gave up his job and moved with his parents to London to devote himself entirely to the study of the theory of electricity. His mathematical skills he had to learn this self-taught, and it took him years to penetrate deeper into Maxwell's work. He finally went on to develop his own mathematical methods that were ahead of its time, the electromagnetic theory and the treatment of resonant circuits but greatly simplified. In 1882 he published regularly in the journal The Electrician. Financially, he was supported by his brother, but also leading scientists supported him. He was most recently in 1896 a pension, and he received offers of financial assistance, for example, of U.S. electricity companies, the Royal Society, and French engineers, but which he often refused out of pride. At the same time he was constantly in financial difficulties, partly because of his habit of his house to heat all winter to high room temperatures, which earned him some of the highest private gas bills the county. The famous physicist Lord Kelvin recognized him as an authority in his field to ( publicly in the Presidential address 1889 for the Institution of Electric Engineers) and also physicist Oliver Lodge and George Francis FitzGerald. He corresponded with Heinrich Hertz and in 1891 he was elected to the Royal Society. In 1905 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Göttingen, he became an honorary member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (1908), the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (1918 ), received the Faraday Medal in 1921 and in 1912 was nominated for the Nobel Prize. He was also the 1904 Hughes Medal of the Royal Society received, but refused. Heaviside lived a long time with his parents, who from 1889 lived with him in Paington about the music his brother's shop. 1894 his mother died and he moved in 1897 after the death of his father, according to Newton Abbott and 1909 to Torquay in the vicinity of his brother ( in a house that belonged to his brother's wife's sister, and henceforth he told her ). He never married and was last exzentrischerer always a hermit. However, many of the circulating about him stories were just myths, carried partly by his droll sense of humor - he made a joke of it, for example, with the enigmatic WORM to sign behind his name. Heaviside is buried in Paignton next to his parents.

Work

Heaviside was instrumental in the introduction of vectors and vector analysis, with which he in 1884 greatly simplified and brought the basic for the electrodynamics of Maxwell equations us today known form. Heaviside also discovered independently the Poynting vector. The vector methods were settled for around 1910 all the way through and displaced also in England in the second half of the 19th century very popular quaternions by William Rowan Hamilton and his Scottish protagonist Peter Guthrie Tait.

Also for the analysis of electrical resonant circuits and circuits he introduced the now widely used methods and coined many terms such as impedance or inductance. He was one of the first people to use complex numbers. For the solution of this occurring differential equations he developed his operator calculus (operational calculus ), who made an algebraic equation from the differential equation and the Laplace transform anticipated how mathematicians discovered later. His operator calculus, which he developed from 1880 to 1887, met with contemporary mathematicians on suspicion, but was later justified by the works of Bromwich and Norbert Wiener. It was not until a good 65 years later could be operator calculus of Jan Mikusiński be mathematically exact reason.

He used the Heaviside step function named after him for investigation of pulses in electrical wiring, and also for the propagation of signals in telegraph lines authoritative Telegraph equation was set up by him. Heaviside also recognized as the first the importance to arrange for a distortion-free transmission at regular intervals induction coils to the telegraph lines, which is mathematically formulated in the Heaviside condition. In England he could thus not prevail because he was at enmity with the technical manager of the post office. In the United States, however, ATT engineers studied his work closely and they reported under his own name for a patent ( Mihajlo Pupin 1900). Pupin made ​​sure that his name was the invention and thus made ​​a fortune. Although Heaviside was a financial compensation offered, but the Heaviside refused despite his financial constraints: he wanted the full recognition. 1880 received Heaviside in England a patent on the coaxial cable.

In 1902, he predicted the existence of the Heaviside layer in the ionosphere before the can reflect radio waves and the (it was experimentally demonstrated only in 1923 ), enabling worldwide spread.

1888/9, he examined the field of moving charges, which George Francis FitzGerald inspired his work in advance of the special theory of relativity ( Fitzgerald - Lorentz contraction ). He also examined the transition in dense media, where he anticipated the Cerenkov radiation ( in Volume III of his Electromagnetic Theory of 1912). Heaviside examined at the same time, the " electromagnetic mass ", which he believed to be as real as that of ordinary matter.

For the electrical analogue of the permanent magnet, he introduced the term electret.

After him also common in particle physics Heaviside - Lorentz system of units is named, in which applies.

Quotes

Mathematics is an experimental science, and definitions were not there first, but arose later.

Publications

• Electromagnetic induction and its propagation. The Electrician, 1885, 1886 and 1887.
• Electrical Papers, 1887.
• The Electro- magnetic effects of a moving charge, Electrician, , 1888.
• On the Electro- magnetic Effects due to the Motion of Electrification through a Dielectric, Phil.Mag.S.5 Vol.27, 1889 p.324, 1889.
• On the Forces, stress, and Fluxes of Energy in the Electromagnetic Field, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, London, 1892.
• A gravitational and electromagnetic analogy, The Electrician, 1893.
• Electromagnetic Theory, Volume I, "The Electrician " Printing and Publishing Company, London, 1898 ( Reprint ISBN 978-1-4400-8252-8 ) Online
• Electromagnetic Theory, Volume II, "The Electrician " Printing and Publishing Company, London, 1899 (Reprint ISBN 978-1-4400-8877-3 ) Online
• Electromagnetic Theory, Volume III, "The Electrician " Printing and Publishing Company, London, 1912 (Reprint ISBN 978-1-4400-8253-5 ) Online