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Heaviside and the Operational Calculus*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2016

J.L.B. Cooper
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Extract

The centenary of the birth of Oliver Heaviside last year has been the occasion of celebration by electrical engineers and physicists in this and other countries. In the discussions of his work much has been said about the Operational Calculus ; and as the versions of its history which have been given both in these commemorative celebrations and in most of the textbooks of the subject are seriously incorrect, this may serve as an occasion to recount that history more correctly. The story in widest circulation is that the Operational Calculus was discovered by Heaviside (Boole being sometimes—and incorrectly—named as the discoverer of its applications to ordinary differential equations) and rejected by British mathematicians because of Heaviside’s lack of rigour. The facts, as I shall show, are that the Calculus was well known in Britain and France before Heaviside’s birth, and that the rejection of his paper had nothing to do with his use of symbolic methods.

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Type
Research Article
Information
The Mathematical Gazette , Volume 36 , Issue 315 , February 1952, pp. 5 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © The Mathematical Association 1952

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Footnotes

*

A lecture given to the London Mathematical Society, on January 18, 1951.

References

Notes : (1) is the best reference for the representational and (2) for the formal calculus in their early years. (5) gives the best general account, including modern developments ; (3) has a useful but one-sided bibliography, which ignores most work by Laplace Transform methods prior to Doetsch. (4) is the most systematic account of symbolic methods. (6) gives an interesting discussion of the peculiarities of the Heaviside calculus.Google Scholar
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