Oliver Heaviside

Heaviside, Oliver 

Born May 18, 1850, in London; died Feb. 3, 1925, in Torquay. English physicist. Fellow of the Royal Society of London (1891).

After completing school in 1866, Heaviside worked for a telegraph company in Newcastle upon Tyne. In 1874, progressive deafness forced him to stop working, and he engaged in independent studies of the theory of electricity. He investigated the propagation of electromagnetic waves in single-wire and two-wire lines and, independently of J. H. Poynting and N. A. Umov, introduced the vector of the flux density of electromagnetic energy. He also developed a theory of long-distance signal transmission. In 1902, independently of A. E. Kennelly, Heaviside showed that an ionized atmospheric layer exists which reflects electromagnetic waves; this layer is known as the Kennelly-Heaviside layer, or the E layer.

Heaviside’s works on the theory of electricity (1892) contained ideas whose importance was not appreciated until much later. For example, Heaviside showed that the mass of a charged particle varies with velocity. Heaviside was the first to develop operational calculus, which later became widely used in physics and other sciences.

WORKS

Electrical Papers, vols. 1–2. London–New York, 1892.
Electromagnetic Theory: The Complete and Unabridged Edition, vols. 1–3. London [1951].

REFERENCES

Lee, G. Oliver Heaviside. London–New York–Toronto [1947].
The Heaviside Centenary Volume. London, 1950.